The new coalition government has pledged $40B (approximately the market cap of Twitter, heh) in loan guarantees for nuclear power construction.
They have also pledged to create legal guarantees that future politicians will not be able to shut down functioning nuclear power reactors without suitable monetary compensation to the owners/operators of these reactors.
In addition to this, they are commissioning an urgent study on how to rebuild Ringhals 1 and 2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringhals_Nuclear_Power_Plant, about 1 GW each), two nuclear reactors that were prematurely decommissioned by the previous social-democratic government and shut down about 20 months ago.
Personally I'm really happy; I think massive expansion of
nuclear power is the only realistic way to fix climate change.
The first reactors built will be modern but traditionally large. From then on: There has been a lot of interest in small modular reactors (SMR) from the political party that is driving all of this, and they actually got the nationally owned energy company Vattenfall to begin building prototypes at Ringhals a few months ago.
In summary: Lots of champagne bottles popping tonight in Sweden in the homes of clean nuclear power proponents. We have been waiting for this for a very long time. Cheers!
The previous government didn't stop the shutdown planned 40+ years ago (due to a national referendum), in part because the owners (Vattenfall) said it's not economically feasible to run them anymore without subsidies. It's complex.
To be fair to both sides, the electricity prices at the time when the decision was made was very different from today. We had prices in the south of sweden 2020 that was as low as around €0.02 per kw/h, compared to over €0.3 in 2022, and in 2020 the price trend was looking to be going downwards.
If prices had continue to go down and let say had landed at €0.01 per kw/h this year than we would not be discussing nuclear power as much. It will be a gamble to say what prices will be in 1, 5, 10 and 20 years into the future, and any gamble involve a cost in one way or an other. The previous government made one bet, this government is doing an other.
The increase of energy prices in Europe doesn't seem to be short term anymore. It reflects a new geopolitical reality, that has almost zero hope of changing soon again. Sure, energy prices will decrease over time, but it will be a very slow process, until we get even in a similar region as a few years back. Governments will have to subsidize not just energy creation, but many more activities, unless we are ready to loose a lot of the wealth and equality we have left in the population.
Currently yes, but hydrogen is so easy to make from electricity that it predates sensible electrical generation methods by 43 years.
We didn't bother making hydrogen in large quantities because there was no point when we already had a convenient supply of a flammable gas, not because it's even remotely difficult.
It’s probably fair to say that energy demand over the next ten years will increase significantly.
The anecdotes of the end of Moores law that signifies the end of electronic efficiency through miniaturization alone and the increasing adoption of energy hungry devices for personal compute or lifestyle will certainly have a multiplicative effect over time as these trends make their way through society.
In such a scenario, it’s hard to imagine prices being the same if demand increases by even a single digit multiple of the present.
He is not contradicting himself. You have to remember the awful efficiency of thermal engines.
Primary energy demand will decrease because you do not lose 70% of the energy by simply cooling it like in steam turbine used by nuclear power plants or car engines.
On the other hand, electricity usage will increase because you have now replaced your 30-40% efficient engines with 90+% efficient engines, but from a different source. That barely have any losses from the primary energy input.
Since we should keep the oil in the ground that current thermal engines uses, the energy input will be from a different source when we change from burning oil to electrical engines. The primary energy input should be from the wind, sun, elevated water, nuclear bonds and geothermal.
The change from 30-40% efficient engines to 90+% efficient engines is if we burn the oil in a power plant. It is an improvement, but not a sufficient big one compared to actually keeping the oil in the ground.
You basically can't get 90% efficiency from burning oil in a power plant. E = 1 - Cold/Hot, where cold ≈ 300 K and hot ≈ 1300 K (gasoline-air fire), giving theoretical maximum efficiency of 77%. In practice much lower, what I've seen is just over 60% even in the best combined cycle power plants.
If you use some really high temperature chemistry, you can get to 5260 K from dicyanoacetylene in oxygen, which is 95%, but not gasoline. And dicyanoacetylene is a bit explody.
True enough, but I’m hopeful for an energy-abundant future where we figure out how to make solar, wind, nuclear, and batteries cheaply and at scale. Imagine what we could do if energy efficiency didn’t trade off against carbon output. We wouldn’t have to replace all our appliances with something slightly more efficient (and less maintainable) every so many years. And the resources it takes to do that could be redirected elsewhere.
> We wouldn’t have to replace all our appliances with something slightly more efficient (and less maintainable) every so many years
We are forced into poorly built, unrepairable appliances through a market failure.
Failure of consumers to spread the word about appliance repairability. Fraudulent forgery of consumer reviews by manufacturers.
Failure of the housing market driving the repair technicians out if business - its cheaoer for someone in china to spend 10 hours building new washing machine than for someone in uk to spend 2 hours fixing it.
In some cases, a deliberate subversion of the spare parts market by manufacturers.
There is not a grand plan to improve efficiency and solve clinate change.
Sure, there’s not much incentive for manufacturers to develop reliable appliances, because people just shop based on price and features. Once of the only constraints is government regulations which ban the old, less efficient designs. Take away those regs, and manufacturers who don’t want to pay for R&D can churn out those simple designs again.
> because people just shop based on price and features
But thats all they can do - suppose I want to fins out if a Samsung phone is more reliable than Fairphone or Huawei - how would I find out? Will their salesmen tell me the truth? would customer support? Does their marketing department publish mean time between failure or statistics for repair?
There is very little hard data where anyone took thousands of appliances and measured their reliability.
The Linus Tech Tips labs is already doing wonders in their market niche, I really really hope it all works out for them.
They've built up significant trust with their community, they're not perfect, but close enough that I'd trust their reviews blindly in domains where I'm not informed enough already. (Everything except their dabble into datacenter storage, virtualization and networking)
I guess part of the problem here is that everything changes so frequently. If technology moved so slowly that generational change in craftsmen was the major source of a change in quality, then you could actually use word of mouth and other external sources of information. Nowadays, the experience of a year or two ago really doesn't necessarily tell you much about the quality of the products that are available now.
The fact that you can use combustion to generate electricity, means they are interchangeable. The other comment is probably more on point about conversion effeciency.
> that you can use combustion to generate electricity, means they are interchangeable
This is an accounting issue, not a question of thermodynamics.
Electricity typically refers to grid electric. We don’t count non plug-in hybrid electrical output as “electricity.” That’s how energy use can be stable while electrification increases.
I bet what is going on isn't that surprising to industry insiders, or the people who make profit-loss decisions about whether to fund power plants or not.
This is the issue with politics and the power market, the language gets locked into "what should we do" which is then interpreted as "well, the government should do it!".
The problem with nuclear power isn't what the government is funding, it is that the government is saddling the industry with enormous costs in attempting to meet an unrealistic safety standard that _nothing else_ is held to. I suspect solar farms would go bankrupt if their waste was held to the same do-no-harm standard.
If the government just let people build what they thought was best, and demanded a generic fact-based safety standard rooted in observed harms (ie, not the stupid linear model after Chernobyl or some arbitrary radiation exposure limit which is literally undetectable vs. coal killing people on a daily basis) then the market could just sort this out.
Nuclear was on the too-cheap-to-meter path until the bureaucrats turned up to help decide how to run the plants. And EU bureaucrats are particularly bad at managing fast paced technological change they have a multi-decade track record of failure at this point in exactly these two fields - technology and energy policy. China is eating their lunch. China! Authoritarian alleged communists! That is what policy failure in the EU has led to.
Yes let's just go free for all and the market sort it out. When was that a good idea when it came to safety critical infrastructure?! The whole let the current generation reap the profits and the market will magically figure things out got us into the current mess in the first place. The nuclear industry is not being held to higher standards relatively than other means of energy production. Wind farms must jump through significant buerocratic hurdles despite the fact that the potential dangers are massively lower.
To give an example of hurdles for wind power: there are some wind mills in the harbor region of Antwerp that aren’t allowed to generate power during the day because one time a single protected bird flew against the turning arm. They’re only allowed to use them when the birds are sleeping.
Are buildings in Antwerp allowed to have windows? This data from Canada in 2013 says for every bird killed by a wind mill about 1000 are killed by "Collisions with Houses".
> Yes let's just go free for all and the market sort it out. When was that a good idea when it came to safety critical infrastructure?!
On days of the week ending with "y". Private markets are the best way to feed people, clothe people, house people, entertain people and keep people healthy. By and large people don't willingly go with a public option in any of those categories if they have a choice. The electricity market is the same.
The evidence at the moment is that someone next to Fukushima when it went bad would be ... perfectly fine. No physical risk. Chernobyl wasn't as bad as a dam collapse. This was all with 1980s tech. The evidence here is that the risk is possible for a private party to handle. Rare evacuations aren't common enough to worry about and are a much smaller problem than making what is happening in Europe at the moment a regular risk.
Note that I'm calling for nuclear to be held to the same safety standards you've been exposed to for your entire life - my objection is that the standards for nuclear are unreasonably high compared to literally everything else.
1) the national referendum was held in 1980, not exactly a recent decision. Most people who voted in that referendum are probably dead.
2) The referendum consisted of four different choices, basically all voting options were a No to nuclear, the only difference between them is how slowly the existing plants should be decommissioned(slowest option won).
3) The majority owners of Vattenfall are the Swedish state and their leadership will say and do what the politicians tell them to say. I’ll bet you a beer that within 6 months they’ll be extremely pro nuclear, just how their new masters want them to be.
3a)
Looks like I was right, but it happened in less than a week not months. The CEO of Vattenfall wants to extend the lifetime for the operational Forsmark and Ringhals nuclear reactors up to a total lifetime of 80 years(!).
Personally I would prefer new reactors instead of keeping these relics alive, but Sweden has a limitation of maximum 10 reactors, complicating the construction of new reactors.
You have to bear in mind that the public was hugely against it. No political party dared to push for it, although negotiations were held.
> The Moderates, the People's Party and the Social Democrats held separate negotiations to formulate a joint yes option with the implication that the reactors would be allowed to be used during their technical lifespan, which was estimated at 25 years. These negotiations finally broke down mainly because the Moderates could not accept the additional proposals: that the state or the municipalities would own the nuclear power plants and that so-called surplus profits from private production of hydropower would be withdrawn through taxation.
It's not complex really. It was made unprofitable with every tool available with this as the goal. There have been much public celebration from the green party, they are proud of the outcome.
Currently no insurance is willing to insure against major disaster. So how are companies going to pay for it? You can look at the cash reserves and immediately see that this cannot be correct.
I should have said they will not insure fully for the consequences of the disaster, in particular not long term effects. Nuclear has limited liability and does not need to cover the full cost of a disaster.
Ok, seems the amount the companies are now liable for is actually capped at some number, which is a fair amount but still not covering a truly major incident. But the cap has gradually increased over time and is thus costing the electric companies more money.
A solar plant is certainly liable if accidents happen on its grounds. They don't need insurance against a major disaster like a meltdown because it can't happen.
Nuclear is NOT liable for a major nuclear disaster. No insurance would cover it. So I don't know where you got your knowledge from but it is not based on fact.
Edit: OK I should have been clearer. They are liable like everyone else. They have (unlike solar installations I suspect) strict liability which means the damaged person does not have to prove fault. However, the amount of liability is limited (in time and amount) and the state takes over. This is what I was referring to with they don't have liability (admittedly incorrect the way I wrote it).
The problem with nuclear liability is that there are potential accidents that are both extremely rare and extremely expensive. Such accidents have only happened twice. This creates some difficulty for calculating insurance premiums.
The article you linked says that TEPCO paid out USD ~65 billion after Fukushima, but it was insured only for USD ~804 million.
Naturally what happened is that the government didn't want to be without electricity, so to prevent bankruptcy TEPCO was nationalized. This is the typical scenario for nuclear power: profits are privatized while losses are socialized.
Yeah… it tends to get uneconomical if you slap a huge special tax on it. A nuclear specific “effektskatt” was added in 2015, this is the real reason that they prematurely shut down the reactors (which would have been running until the mid 2020s).
It's interesting Europe is willing to spend billions of tax dollars on human rights like food, housing, medical care, and all sorts of social programs.
But not electricity. Any power plant not profitable will be shut down. No level of public investment will be tolerated.
The previous anti-nuclear social-democratic government together with the demonstrably insane "green" party installed a board in the state owned power company Vattenfall that after a while managed to sort of claim that it wasn't economically feasible to run the nuclear plants, with the new heavy taxes the social democrats had put in place on nuclear power production.
Yay?
Anyway, all of that insanity is thankfully history now.
You really can't make an assessment like "speaking half truths and most likely knows it" about someone's intent from their internet comments. The vast majority of commenters are just posting their opinions straightforwardly. They may be wrong, or half wrong, but that's not the same thing as deliberately being misleading.
No need for personal attacks. I'm not a sore loser.
I think it's a waste that we've not maintained the reactors well enough to still have them able to run at a profit.
And generally that we've (the government, both sides) haven't done anything about it in the last 10-20 years when they had a chance to invest in alternatives (whether building new nuclear or other types of energy sources).
If it's just a matter of taxes then I'm sure it would be easy for the new government to remove them and start back up the old reactors - but obviously that's not the plan. Most likely it's all quite complex and lots of factors leading to this outcome.
Edit: the Swedish green party has promoted renewable power and less dependency on Russian fossile fuels for decades. Not sure why gp calls them insane. Possibly because they consider the Swedish commitments to the Paris agreement important.
So this party gets about 4-5% of the votes. It's a tiny little thing, but they have had an almost catastrophic level of influence on Swedish policy because of even more stupid reasons.
Anyway, what you asked for; here are the high level notes of the insanity. There are lots of insane but largely inconsequential things that I won't focus on.
Key policy writers clearly don't understand the difference between energy and power.
Because of that: Shuts down functioning nuclear power plants "in the name of the environment".
Attempts to replace plannable nuclear power with wind power. ("It produces the same number of GWh annually.")
> Key policy writers clearly don't understand the difference between energy and power.
Ridiculous. Of course they do.
> Shuts down nuclear power.
You don't know what you are talking about. It was decided decades ago in a referendum that Sweden should move away from nuclear power. A majority of the parties in the parliament has supported this for decades.
Despite that. The government hasn't actively closed down nuclear power. Shut downs have been decided based on the economics of running the plants.
And don't start about the "effektskatten" (a tax on nuclear energy in Sweden), it's older than the green party.
You want nuclear power. They support renewables. That's why you call them insane.
> It was decided decades ago in a referendum that Sweden should move away from nuclear power
A 1980 referendum where the three options were
1. Decommission the nuclear power, as soon as it is socio-economically feasible.
2. Decommission the nuclear power, as soon as it is socio-economically feasible. Work on reducing electricity use (by e.g. stopping new homes from being built with electric heating), invest in renewable power, and nationalize power generation to be able to control its future.
3. Decommission the nuclear power within 10 years.
So, it's no wonder that "Decommission the nuclear power" won that referendum. Anyone who brings up this referendum as a reason to decommission nuclear power 40 years later is being disingenuous.
My reason for bringing up the referendum was this: Gp insinuated the green party had somehow single handedly shut down Swedish nuclear reactors. This is not the case. The referendum shows scepticism towards nuclear has been the majority opinion in the Swedish parliament for decades. This changed only recently. The green party is one of several parties sceptical towards nuclear energy, they are not some kind of extremists.
The winning proposal of referendum about nuclear power in 1980 never said anything about when the shutdown should be, that was something the politicians added afterwards. What it said was that shutdowns should be done as long it doesn’t undermine employment and welfare.
And because these shutdowns have radically increased electricity prices with unemployment as a result, thus both undermining employment and welfare, it actually violates what the winning proposal stipulated in the referendum.
Furthermore the tax on nuclear power was massively increased three times as consequence of influence of the two green parties, Center party and the Green Party, 2006, 2008 and 2015, and the same time subsidizing renewables, thus making nuclear power not economically sustainable. There was even a referendum in parliament about these latest shutdown with only one vote difference. No, it was intentional.
> these shutdowns have radically increased electricity prices
No they have not. Sweden has been a net exporter of electricity every year since 2010. There is no electricity deficit in Sweden.
Prices have increased because we've become more integrated with the European electricity market. Not because electricity production is lower or more expensive. The energy companies make unprecedented profits because they are able to sell cheaply produced electricity at expensive rates.
The last year prices have increased because of the energy/economic warfare waged between the EU and Russia.
The idea that a couple of Swedish nuclear reactors could alter the whole European energy market significantly is ludicrous.
>>You want nuclear power. They support renewables. That's why you call them insane.
Nuclear and renewables are not mutually exclusive. The Swedish green party rejects nuclear. The parent commenter hasn't expressed a rejection of renewables.
Anyway, one can perceive a rejection of a particular energy source as "insane", especially if they are a green party who claim the rise in CO2 levels is the world's most pressing crisis.
so they get compensated if they have to close it even so the government payed them to build it. this sound like a bad deal. Tax payers pay for the whole thing and the owner gets even more money if they have to close it for whatever reason.
I don't think coal is the answer but germany didn't do enough for renewables during the last 10 years when we knew we would shut down the nuclear plants. So now evrybody uses bad management as pro for nuclear reactors.
I think the reasons to shut it down are always overlooked and only the pros of nuclear energy are considered in those arguments.
Its theoretical money, not actual money. A potential future cost. It only becomes actual money if there is a default.
And in most default scenarios, the government wouldn't have to pay the full $40 billion. Just the shortfall between the foreclosure sale price and the remaining loan amount.
> So ask yourself why will commercial funders not give money to the builds, while they are perfectly happy for solar/wind?
First, Solar/wind projects are typically smaller. Less risky to do hundreds or thousands of small projects, spread out over country (or world). The chance of all the projects defaulting at once are small.
Second, one of the biggest risk to nuclear projects are government related. The risk that they might introduce expensive new regulations. Or that the general population (who are typically anti-nuclear) might vote a new anti-nuclear government into power. By having the current government guarantee the loans, future governments will be motivated to not mess with them.
Third, you can't always trust commercial funders to do what's best for the nation, especially from a national security perspective. They might (for example in Germany) decide to rely on cheap natural gas imports from Russia as the primary source of energy, assuming that Russia will always be a stable source of energy forever, and would never start randomly invading it's neighbors.
Never the less, the financing strategy works. At least in Scandinavia. Defaulting happens rarely enough to not be an issue.
Well-run governments can borrow money much cheaper than private actors. Lower interest rates means a higher chance of success for a long-running project.
They are theoretical money that might become real money in the future.
They don't cost the government anything unless a power plant fails and defaults on it's loans. And even the it's not the full $40 billion. Just the shortfall between what the bank can recover and the cost of the loan.
And if the project got anywhere near completely, there should still be a nuclear power plant.
Given that one of the bigger risks to nuclear power plans are changing government regulations, it's actually a pretty low risk loan guarantee for the government to make. There is a decent chance they will never have to activate the guarantee.
> Or, how would you like to provide me loan guarantees? They won't cost you anything. Right?
I mean... What are you taking a loan out on? how does it benefit me? What are the risks of you defaulting? Why is my risk assessment different from the bank? In the case of a default, what is the shortfall likely to be?
With the right answers to those questions, it might be in my interests to guarantee a loan for you.
> They are theoretical money that might become real money in the future.
> They don't cost the government anything unless a power plant fails and defaults on it's loans. And even the it's not the full $40 billion. Just the shortfall between what the bank can recover and the cost of the loan.
I can't believe we are having this discussion on HN. Are you seriously implying loan guarantees are free?
> And if the project got anywhere near completely, there should still be a nuclear power plant.
Except that is not guaranteed. Historically speaking nuclear power plants have been going massively over budget. So the one thing that seems guaranteed is that the government has to guarantee even more loans.
> Given that one of the bigger risks to nuclear power plans are changing government regulations, it's actually a pretty low risk loan guarantee for the government to make.
Point me to any case where changing government regulations were a significant risk for nuclear power plants. The main risk is that the build goes massively over budget (like what is happening with pretty much every build in recent history), which will make it much more difficult to recover the cost.
>There is a decent chance they will never have to activate the guarantee.,
So if that is the case why do they need it? Private investors should be all over it. The reality is, the risk is high for questionable return. That is why they need the government to step in.
Its all built on very old thinking. Nuclear may have been a good idea in the past, but with the rapid reduction of cost of renewable, especially solar, its no longer worth considering. Building a plant takes a decade, and a decade from now the difference in cost will be even greater. Nuclear will look like huge waste of money then.
During winter, when electricity needs are high, northern Europe maybe gets total of 0-6 hours of sunlight, and most of is not the optimal angle or intensity. It's also often overcast, so solar barely generates power.
On the worst winter days, when its -5F, and the energy needs are the highest, there is also no wind.
The Baltic Sea also freezes and there is barely any tidal movement.
There isn't really a renewable that works for Northern European energy needs during winter. Hydro is the exception but it's geo based you can't build unlimited hydroplants and also during winter the water levels are not the highest.
The sun doesn't shine, especially at useful angles, enough and battery technology at scale isn't there. We absolutely need nuclear, essentially no matter the cost, assuming populations of certain countries don't want to use coal.
What type of utility scale storage isn't a battery? The answer is, of course: any energy storage setup is a battery[1].
A more generous interpretation of your comment is that you meant won't be chemical batteries.
In which case, I'll bite: what then?
1. Energy storage is the capture of energy produced at one time for use at a later time[1] to reduce imbalances between energy demand and energy production. A device that stores energy is generally called an accumulator or battery.
Hydrogen. However electrolysis is still an immature technology and has massive energy losses in every step of the procedure. You can negate that somewhat if produce and store at the same location of the intended use, like providing electricity to a building with hydrogen tank, hydrogen that is generated by solar panels.
However this is of course not enough to run industries with high electricity demand, what people tend to forget is that one factory (like melting of aluminum) can consume more electricity in one day than an entire city in a year. For that you need nuclear power or hydro.
Hydrolysis has had high losses until recently, but efficiency is now well over 90%.
The remaining problem is building factories for electrolysis equipment. Building factories takes an appallingly long time. But the problem is only of time, not technical maturity.
As we are talking about Sweden, a relatively cold country, a big chunk of energy consumption is about heating. And heat is a form of energy that is much easier to storage than electricity. I very much assume that even seasonal storage of heat is becoming a big thing in coming years, dwarfing any chemical battery capacity whatsoever. After all, for that, in the most basic form, you need a big enough pool of water connected to electric grid with a resistor and to district heating system with a heat exchanger.
Sweden generates 40% of the current power generation from hydro. Adapt that to be more flexible than baseload and Sweden has amazing capabilities to run an entire renewable grid mainly based on wind with a minimal amount of chemical short-term storage.
There are few countries with better opportunities for renewables than Sweden.
We are in a good place, but our hydro is basically maxed out and can not support a future (with higher consumption) no-wind scenario during winter since it does not have enough power for that alone.
Nuclear power is a good idea, but so is wind for Sweden. We already have a lot of wind but high pressure areas with little wind do exist, even in winter. Nuclear looks kind of good from that point of view, but I strongly feel that Sweden is way too small of an actor to buy reactors on her own, and should actually co-order reactors with other countries, getting the costs down (maybe not even costs, but risks. There have been a lots of bankrupted players in nuclear lately).
> The sun does, in fact, shine far, far more than enough.
Not in northern Europe. For example at the southern most point of Finland there is 3 months in the year when solar produces less than 1% of its name plate capacity. It does get slightly better in the southern part of Sweden but still not that great.
Around Mediterranean is where solar starts to get really good though the Africa side of it is even better.
Renewables and nuclear are economically incompatible. Nuclear is capex dominated, you want to run your nuclear plants at 100% capacity to make a profit. So if you want to mix them with non-dispatchable power like renewables you either have enough nuclear plants to cover 100% of demand (for times when there is no wind and no sun) and make a loss on them most of the time, or you don't and get blackouts.
Storage is the only compatible solution to renewables (that is not fossil fuels). As far as I know renewables+storage are cheaper than 100% nuclear and much faster to build.
The energy demands in the market right now are very different than what they were even 20 years ago (I mean, who would have imagined crypto mining or large model training in the state it’s in?)
We’re heavily constrained as a society in our use of energy. For example, you don’t just leave the heat/AC on all day when weather conditions demand it, do you?
Similarly, we don’t have massive desalination capacity on the west coast in spite of years of drought with the Pacific right on the coast.
Energy is one of those things that society has no choice but to live within its means on. We can build all the nuclear capacity we want to and yet, may still see future demand in intensive areas such as carbon capture, desalination, supercomputing clusters come up that are great candidates for any buffer capacity we may have, should we be so lucky.
This all goes without mentioning the huge surge of lower income populations that will slowly be increasing consumption over the next few decades. Hundreds of millions(perhaps billions) of people in India, Africa, Asia and South America (The global south) consume very, very little energy today because of financial constraints and development. A lot of these people may not have access to transmission infrastructure for a long time and solar, wind and the like certainly find their use in many such places today.
Correction: Northern Sweden has the right terrain for it. And there's a limit to how much hydro that can be built there, and it's close to built out already.
Enjoy paying for storage. At least in the US, even if we get storage down from $438/kWh (Jan 2022 grid-scale storage costs) to $200/kWh, consumer electricity prices are expected to rise somewhere between 1400% and 2200% per kWh, and total cost estimates to switch the entire US's power generation + distribution to pure renewables + storage, while maintaining current production and availability levels, are over $430tn, which is >20x the US GDP, according to: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/01/12/the-cost-of-net-zero-...
The article I linked acknowledges this, and talks about it. Remember that like with Moore's law, there will eventually be hard, physics-based walls past which we will not progress without entirely new technology paradigms, which aren't guaranteed to be discovered in any finite amount of time.
I'm glad it's getting cheaper, and I'm all for supplementing baseline load with solar, wind, and hydro, but I'm less confident with strategies that ultimately boil down to placing trust in improvements that we may or may not reach.
That's not an assertion that reaching, say, $10/kWh for storage won't be possible, but I think it would be wise to have a plan B in case we're unable to get it lower than, say, $100/kWh.
Not having a Plan B and placing almost all of our eggs in one basket (fossil fuels) is how we got to this point in the first.
.. Last I read even the automotive industry had trouble sourcing batteries.
Would be interesting to know how many minutes(seconds?) of electricity we could store in all batteries produces last year should we go all in. This at least battery storage seems naive at such scale.
Please stop accusing people of wishing for higher energy prices or being a troll. You have done it on a huge number of posts in this thread. If you want to convince anybody accusing them of wanting something bad is not the way to do it. In fact it makes you look like a troll.
I've heard of gravity batteries, but they are not a proven technology for utility-scale storage (yet). Can you please elaborate on what utility-scale storage will take the place of our current system whereby production generally scales up and down with demand, which will be more difficult with energy sources that can only produce intermittently like solar and wind? Hydro and wave energy generators look promising for baseline load, but those won't alleviate the need for utility-scale storage altogether, right?
Renweable + storage in the form of lithium ion batteries exceeds the cost of nuclear by at least 50%. Some upcoming technologies liek compressed CO2 batteries make make price parity with nuclear a possibility but as of now your comment is incorrect.
Will not happen. ”green” energy is not green- it consume massive amount of resources, it is expensive, short lived, destabilize the grid. I’m super happy my country is finally waking up from the horrible green hypnosis.
It’s Time to Wake Up - The Currently Known Global Mineral Reserves Will Not Be Sufficient to Supply Enough Metals to Manufacture the Planned Non-fossil Fuel Industrial Systems
"No matter what minerals will be needed, we will need large quantities of them as the renewable power sources like wind and solar, require extensive mineral resources to manufacture the infrastructure for fossil-free energy.
And there is a challenge. Given the estimated required number of Electric Vehicles (EV’s) of different vehicle class, it is clear that there are not enough minerals in the currently reported global reserves to build just one generation of batteries for all EV’s and stationary power storage, in the global industrial ecosystem as it is today."
To put it nice, I would be careful to use that report to back any argument whatsoever. To come up with their conclusion they e.g. basically assumed LFP battery chemistry does not exist. (To be more accurate, they assumed that there is a set amount of nickel/cobalt you need to produce a kWh of lithium batteries) The conclusion also requires that no significant new reserves are found after 2018, which already now is proven false. (Lithium reserves have increased since 2018 by more than what a single generation of EVs need.)
Olympic Dam SA is the world's second biggest uranium mine.
For every 0.6 kg of Uranium it produces, it produces 20kg of copper and 4.5g of silver.
Monosilicon PV is made of sand, copper, silver and aluminum.
A kg of uranium going through a pwr produces about 500GJ (with 3-10% of that being required for milling and enrichment). The 7.5g of silver in the ore that produced that kg of Uranium will produce about 200GJ in its lifetime with technologies in the pipeling that will push this to 400GJ. This silver usage is going down faster than production is increasing. There will be a huge surplus of copper from this source.
The silver is recyclable.
The uranium will require special storage for millenia or reprocessing at a cost not even massively subsidized programs are willing to bear.
The solar energy can be stored in a battery made from sodium, carbon, iron and aluminum. This is basically the composition of dirt. These are being mass produced now and full industrialisation of the supply chain is expected by 2024.
The nuclear reactor requires large quantities of zirconium, molybdenum, chromium, silver, cadmium and many other rare metals. Much of this is radioactive waste at eol.
The nuclear reactor requires more steel than the solar panel requires silicon, and more concrete than the solar panel requires glass and concrete.
A uranium mine can provide nearly as much energy from PV as it does via fission, and will soon produce more. Let that sink in for a bit.
The point isn't that PWRs are prohibitive. The point is that renewables are fine in any world where the only existing kind of full scale grid generating nuclear reactor is fine.
The total amount of cars needed each year is a combination of people getting one for the first time and others who are replacing one. That car that is replaced, assuming it's not being resold, is material that could reenter the system.
Also moving pulling back this debate to more general topics:
1.We don't need to replace all cars, many older gas powered cars will still be on the road for a long time which buys time for points 2-4
2. There are other types of batteries, like NiMH, which don't contain lithium. Although these aren't as efficient many hybrids use them, I think the new Mavrick hybrid does (or some truck hybrid)
3. There could be new battery technology that will be invented
4.New technology has helped Tesla make more energy dense batteries and have them last longer
A 2016 model s with the 70kwh battery pack has a 200 miles of range
A 2022 Model s performance with a 98kwh battery pack has a range of 326 miles
(this is a touch comparison because the new performance has much more power)
You realise we are talking about Sweden here, not a subsaharan country by any stretch. In general in Europe (especially in Northern Europe) all solar and wind capacity has to backed up by at least the same amount of quickly available online dependable capacity. In practice this means natural gas and diesel plants that are off, or coal/nuclear that is being diverted elsewhere when the sun shines/wind blows. The EU grid is pretty well interconnected so excess capacity is pretty easy to sell (up to a point). This is one of the reasons why renewables can be used as a large piece of the total supply.
However, unless time comes when we can deploy multi TWh lithium energy storage (highly unlikely - just look at shortages required for electric cars) or we have grids that can send let's say entire country's worth of capacity from the coast of Norway to Greece on a moment's notice there is no way renewables will ever go beyond few tens of % at the extreme best as measured in proportion of energy actually delivered.
The misinformation on the subject has been pushed very hard in recent years as it benefits many special interest groups. For example those articles we see sometimes about "German's entire electricity supply coming from renewables on a given day" or "40% of all electricity produced came from renewables in first half of a year" fail to mention Germany has Frances heavily nuclear backed supply on one side, its other neighbor's conventional (coal) supplies to lean on so we should really consider the entire system not cherry pick parts that fit our narrative.
Am I against renewables? No, I've invested my own money this year into solar (before the war started so I didn't even know how electricity prices will spike) and I am a big proponent of its use where possible. Unfortunately our grid is not built in a way that allows everyone to have solar. At the same time we don't have enough lithium batteries to meet our transportation needs, so thinking we'll have enough for grid level storage is a pipe dream.
People that are for off lining existing nuclear capacity really achieve only increased use of gas/diesel for energy production as well as diminish our industry's competitiveness in the world through extremely high energy costs. This will have zero impact on climate as China will pick up all the slack we leave regarding co2 emissions and some. In fact it may even be worse, because we could've built same products(steel concrete etc) with a mix of nuclear/renewables/small chunk of conventional generation while they mostly use dirty coal.
All we'll achieve by this self industrial devolution is furthering our dependence on countries like China and Russia.
Who said we need to put the solar cells in Sweden? We could put them anywhere. Sweden is already producing enough low cost energy to meet its needs, only prices are high because we are exporting it to other countries willing to pay. If Sweden wants to invest in power for export, we could make that investment anywhere.
> Who said we need to put the solar cells in Sweden?
Having the natural gas in Russia hasn’t really worked out for Sweden. People care about security of supply because national markets are more robust than international ones.
Not self sufficient enough and also depending on weather.
There will be much higher demand of electricity in the close future, e.g. battery factories requires a lot of it.
Carbon free steel is another, true is that some of it the involved companies will provide their own electricity production, but that will not be enough.
But there are also other industry that requires electricity for expansion like food industry, paper mills etc.
Another thing is that Sweden has an unequal distribution of production of electricity, a lot of production (hydro) is far north where fewer live, and little production far south where everyone live.
The nuclear reactors that were shutdown was all in southern Sweden.
It is hard to transport vast amount of electricity from north to south because of limited bandwidth but also because of the newly shutdown nuclear reactors, they provided necessary stability to grid, with them gone it made it harder to transport electricity from north to south.
Another problem is that because of the push on wind power and the shutdown on nuclear power, the electricity system has become much more weather dependent resulting in massive price spikes. That is generally bad for industry that want predictable prices.
This also has the consequence that the electricity price of the continent can infect the price in Sweden because Sweden is connected to the same grid. If temporary shortage in southern Sweden, then import of capacity from the continent is required but with that comes a higher price.
Sweden does have great mountains and hydropower, which makes integrating wind power easier. (Or even some solar too. It's bad in the winter but otherwise tends to anticorrelate with wind, which is good.) And nukes as well.
Also, the international spot power market actually started with Nordpool in the nordics, where it expanded to Europe. The countries in Europe buy and sell electricity all the time and it is a tremendous benefit. https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/maps/#/nordic
> You realise we are talking about Sweden here, not a subsaharan country by any stretch. In general in Europe (especially in Northern Europe) all solar and wind capacity has to backed up by at least the same amount of quickly available online dependable capacity.
Are you doing any research before you write stuff like this?! It is trivial to show that this statement is false (let's not even get int the at least). Just look at Germanys capacity,
This is because Germany does a lot of direct gas/oil heating. If you scroll further down on your own source you will see that gas consumption is actually bigger than renewables.
Northern Europe for the most part switched over to district and electric heating (direct or air/ground pumps) a long time ago.
No civil nuke plant has ever been operated, anywhere in the world, without massive government subsidies, or by coercing ratepayers to pay well above market rates.
Looks like the Swedish public will be on the hook for subsidies for decades more while the rest of Europe (France and Romania perhaps excepted) coasts on renewables at ever plunging prices.
Energy use in Sweden peaks in the winter, and especially a few extremely cold days. The sun literally doesn't rise in the northern parts, and the coldest days have almost no wind (and frankly it's not very strong overall either). This and last year, Swedes are stocking up on firewood, and it's not for cosplaying reason. Several knowledgeable people predict rolling blackouts this winter.
I would love renewables as much as the next guy but there's simply not a chance that Sweden could sustain a winter with the current supply. Importing helps with survival but the prices are insane, since their neighbors are cold as well. Dispatchable or baseload energy is necessary, and thus nuclear is the only carbon neutral option. Sure, it's more expensive than solar panels midday in the desert, but the comparison is irrelevant.
Nuclear is indeed slow, and we wouldn't be in this shitty situation if politicians and journalists would have informed themselves instead of selling dreams and fairy dust. It's not exactly like the rational voices didn't exist. And whaddaya know, look, now reality knocking on the door. What a surprise.
Yes, the north is oversupplied, because they have most of the hydro. Remember though that hydro is a form of storage, so even if the transmission capacity was higher, it'd deplete faster. I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but I highly doubt that transmission alone can solve the issue long term, even less so the short term ones. Again, dispatchable and/or baseload energy is a MUST. And the people who yesterday sold solar dreams are today selling energy storage dreams. It's the same great story, but it doesn't exist. Nuclear exists, and it's carbon neutral. It's better to start now, then to not start at all or resorting to oil/gas.
There is one good short-medium term effect of the government change, for nuclear. Maintaining and/or restoring the existing reactors could be done much faster than building new ones. Not all reactors in Sweden are operational today.
Fun fact: plans were announced a few days ago to build out transmission lines from the north to central Sweden. Cost is projected to be 14 billion SEK, time to completion (in 2036) 14 years:
EU has a yearly public report on energy subsidies that demonstrate factually where subsidies goes, how much, and for what purpose. Nuclear subsidies are a proportional small part of the subsidies, and the public get more energy per $subsidies in nuclear than from other energy sources. Some key findings from 2021 report:
"Subsidies to nuclear had varied between €3.2bn and € 4bn between 2008 and 2019 but surged to (€6.3bn) in 2020 due to payments for early closures of nuclear power plants."
"In line with anticipations in the Commission Study, the financial aid to renewables in the EU27 is increasing at a low pace since 2015 to reach €78bn in 2019. Our preliminary estimations show a slight reduction in 2020 to around €77bn. Among the 14 identified subsidy instruments, the feed-in-tariff and feed-in premium schemes remain by far the MS preferred tools to promote RES technologies. They represented 79% of the total RES subsidies, i.e. €61bn in 2019"*
These accounting of subsidies almost always omit the bulk as not accounted in euros. The disaster liability subsidy, and the decommissioning subsidy are rarely so much as mentioned.
They are accounting the tax money going from the government bank account into the owners of power plants. Money that could go to pay for hospitals or schools.
They don't account for theoretical subsidies of money, as then there would be more money in subsidies than there would be money. The theoretical subsidies that currently goes into fossil fuel to pay for global warming is reaching the point of infinitive money in the case that global warming goes beyond the tipping point. Theoretical subsidies are fun thought experiments but they aren't very valuable, as is infinitive money.
The report do account for decommissioning subsidy if there is actually government money going into the hands of power plants owners.
Not every country uses a decommissioning subsidy as you should just take the money from the plants during their lifetime and put in a fund for this purpose. This is what is happening in Finland and the fund already has more money then the projected decommissioning costs but they still keep pumping more money into them just in case.
Show me one place anywhere in the entire history of grid-scale renewables where the consumer's costs went down.
The cost to the developer of deploying new solar / wind to a grid may become more favourable, but they're selling in to a market that reselles to retail / commercial clients, who will, inevitably, pay more over time.
I think what you're argument should be is that new nuclear would result in end-users paying more than they would for new renewables.
I'm mostly convinced where you, or anyone else, lands on the matter, is heavily biased by preconceptions...
and generally tend to think we have the resources to do a many-pronged approach, and that success is less technology dependant and more dependant on the competence of governments and bureaucracies, and the people who constitute them.
> No civil nuke plant has ever been operated, anywhere in the world, without massive government subsidies, or by coercing ratepayers to pay well above market rates.
Here in Finland we do. They can't coerce the rate payers as the customer is free to buy their electricity from whomever producer they want here and the only government subsidy is helping with the insurance.
On page 8 you can see that they have been producing cheaper electricity then the average nordpool area price for Finland for the last 10+ years. (and even before that but the graph starts at 2010). The difference is basically what their owners make as profits. TVO does not sell directly to end users. It only sells to its owners at production costs who can then flip that on the market if they feel like it or cover their fixed price contracts (or just use it themselves for the owners that are big energy heavy industrial companies)
Renewables (except hydro) have not driven a grid anywhere in the world, because storage is expensive both in $€ terms and in CO2/kWh terms. Maybe you’ll see the California grid running in 20 years all on renewables + storage at a crazy high cost per kWh and a stupid CO2/kWh compared to nuclear, and that’s just because it’s sunny 300 days a year here!
PPAs at inflated prices are absolutely subsidies. They impose inflated costs on users of the power, which is only marginally better than on the body politic at large. Or marginally worse, maybe.
Much of the subsidies are the public picking up the tab for disaster insurance the operator is protected against needing to pay for. Of course no actual insurance company could afford to underwrite such a policy.
I think it's fine if governments pay for and operate power generation facilities, but at the same time I don't think private companies should be prohibited from building power generation facilities if they want to and they think they can do it better (provided they have to pay for externalities).
If anything's good about renewables is that they can be quite small scaled. I think it's cool that I can be an energy producer just with my roof, plus decentralized generation = better security.
Speed of deployment + complexity (bugger all) + safety of deployment (passive product v product that can root entire ecosystems) + ongoing maintenance means solar>nuclear any day.
Nuclear is over priced, high risk centralised power. Yuck.
Has there been, in recent memory, any grid scale generator, or roof-top solar for that matter, that didn't get significant subsidies?
The argument should be about whether or not those subsidies would have been better spend elsewhere.
I'd probably argue subsidising local wind / solar (plus storage), and local manufacturing of same, would be better, even though I tend to argue nuclear is a reason option some of the time.
The grid can be balanced by the application of market forces. (If there's an electrical shortage, prices go up. If there's a surplus, prices go down. The incentives are all there to encourage producers to produce power during shortages.)
I was thinking more about pollution or nuclear waste management. A coal plant that just buys coal at market prices and sells electricity at market prices isn't paying for externalities unless they're taxed on CO2 and particulate emissions.
You could balance it that way but people don't like it when there is a power out, nor do they like when a electrical shortage causes prices to rice 10-20x that of normal prices. At that point people will vote on politicians that will fix the problem using tax money to bail out the situation, similar to how people expect government to fix the problem when banks crashes.
Nuclear has always had massive scaling issues because leaving base load power generation means ever lower capacity factors. Running a nuclear power plant with a 40% capacity factor more than doubles the cost per kWh.
You can look at Frances ~70% average Capacity factor in 2 ways either it’s a ~30% cost premium over most of the rest of the world on every power plant. Or more realistically ~40% of generation was at the normal ~92% CF, and every plant after that was at lower capacity factors until the final power plant was costing ~3X as much per kWh.
And that’s with them having largely non nuclear countries to export power to on nights and weekends. The economics look even worse if every country try’s to scale nuclear power.
PS: I respect Frances investment in subsidizing nuclear power, but it’s important to understand the underlying economics if you want to scale nuclear power. The best option for a cheap nuclear grid is massive amounts of cheap storage.
"Nuclear has always had massive scaling issues because leaving base load power generation means ever lower capacity factors."
So Swedish electricity generation used to be about 50% hydro and 50% nuclear. It worked really well for decades and made/kept us rich, despite our high salary costs due to the welfare state. Our industries had the benefits of very cheap and clean energy. The envy of the world!
Then our stupid politicans shut down half of the nuclear capacity and tried to replace with wind. I honestly think that the root cause is that the individuals responsible for this did not understand the difference between power and energy. It obviously didn't work.
I largely agree. Sweden is close to a best case for nuclear as hydroelectric power can easily solve the dispatchable generation and solar isn’t viable. It’s still going to need significant subsides to hit 50%, but nowhere near what counties with less Hydro would need.
They even have cold temperatures to boost power plant efficiency and make district heating very useful.
> You can look at Frances ~70% average Capacity factor in 2 ways either it’s a ~30% cost premium over most of the rest of the world on every power plant.
Insufficient detail.
You'd need to compare levelised costs, and work out whether government subsidies for this-or-that technology resulted in gains and loses that were better or worse than whatever else governments might have spent money on.
There's a good argument to be made that cheap-to-the-end-user electricity is a net good for society, because they can then spend that money elsewhere rather than on boring old electricity.
Besides all that, nuclear needs a lot of cooling capacity, and that's typically come from rivers / oceans, which, if I recall correctly, some rivers in France where recently too warm / insufficient flow to meet nuclear cooling demands.
So nuclear isn't always a good fit for many reasons, but may be a good fit for many other reasons.
A county can’t subsidize it’s own power, it’s got to pay what it costs. Producers, distributors, and consumers of electricity within a county can receive subsides, but that runs into all the usual issues with planned economies.
Arguing about how efficient subsides are vs other spending ignores the option to not spend the money and have consumers directly pay the bill. This normally results in greater efficiency because consumers can chose to say lower the thermostat and spend money on something else etc. People will argue for subsidies to deal with externalities, but markets can equally respond to simply taxing those externalities.
> runs into all the usual issues with planned economies.
Oh, and the war in Ukraine does not show the glaring weakness of 'Unplanned economy' and just choosing the cheapest supplier?
Subsidies and incentives do not a planned economy make.
Folks in the west seem to have taken the failure of hofhly corrupt planning system of USSR as an indication that they dont need to do any thinking or planning at all.
The point of subsidies and incentives is to plan an economy.
There are many different levels of panned economies. With say US food subsides and tariffs as a less extreme than Maoist China or the USSR, but they still have huge and well known problems. Messing with Food production has resulted in inefficiency, waste, pollution, corruption, etc but also overconsumption with it’s extremely negative health impacts.
It’s just really hard to improve on the feedback loops of market economies without running into diminishing returns.
Markets aren’t governments, but they have raised the global standard of living vastly beyond our ancestors. They all happily do long term planning, just look at VC funding for risky investments that won’t see returns for years.
Markets existed for six thousand years, they predate ancient egypt. It is scientists and engineers who raised our standars of living, and they appeared recently. It is absolutely perserve for proponents of markets to take credit they do not deserve.
Take the invention of Penicilin, Alexander Flemming raised our standards of living while working at a public hospital. It was british and US governments who established mads manufacturing of it, not markets. The inventor never became a billionaire.
Most inventors never do.
Years mean nothing, you have to invest in decades.
And you still haven't addressed the issue of western co.panies selling weapons to regimes that want to see us dead - that's quite a critical flaw, don't you think?
So you don’t actually know how ancient or medieval markets worked. That explains the confusion.
Generally people couldn’t arbitrarily start a business without permission. Rulers would limit who could say sell salt and permission it’s self was quite valuable. Think Arrakis being handed over in Dune, only one house had the right to mine spice and that would change based on politics not just competence.
And that’s just the start as slavery, guilds, gender, etc all limited markets.
Throughout history you can track a huge wealth boom whenever places opened up their markets. England’s wealth traces back before the industrial revolution to the early dissolution of serfdom relative to most places. It was actually far more influential than inventions like the early steam engine.
As to penicillin, invention is onky part of the story having a society where people had free time and resources to do research was it’s self a major hurdle. As would having surplus labor to manufacture such complex medicine.
> England’s wealth traces back before the industrial revolution to the early dissolution of serfdom relative to most places.
So let me get this argument straight:
1. Slavery and serfdom are bad for the economy. We are talking pure economics, not morality
2. Markets have freely sold and bought slaves for thousands of years
3. Slavery predates the concept of a government, it predates writing and predates ancient egypt
4. Abolition of slavery required intervention of government and violence
5. Therefore you have just made a pro-regulation argument while arguing against government.
You cannot claim that unregulated markets magically and efficiently organise economy towards it's most efficient state.
The same situation applies to child labour. The exact same situation arised with health and safety. The exact same situation arises with our markets selling precision weapons to bloody dictators that use our weapons against us.
So we have 4 spesific cases of markets delivering rettible outcome and not a single counterexample from you for marktes delivering optimal outcome.
Abolishment of serfdom as a general practice in a England didn’t require government intervention it was actually outcompeted as strange as it sounds. By the time the law changed relatively few people where directly impacted.
This is part of a long term global trend which relates to the overhead of slavery and then serfdom. Serfdom outcompeted slavery in Europe because it was simply more efficient, and Serfdom in turn failed for the same reason.
Child labor was more an outgrowth of the industrial revolution which initially reduced the need for complex skills or physical strength. Kids going back thousands of years would help with harvesting etc, but it was also common practice to pay tradesmen to take on apprentices because child labor was effectively worth nothing when averaged across a year.
It was only when jobs got ultra specialized that child labor became valued. Though eventually flipped back where collage students are talking unpaid internships because Google etc has no use for their services. Obviously collage students can do some forms productive labor, but ignoring the law what can 10 year olds do? Acting and here it’s surprise surprise perfectly legal in western countries for 10 year olds to actually work. Suggesting it’s more a question of economics than morality.
> which, if I recall correctly, some rivers in France where recently too warm / insufficient flow to meet nuclear cooling demands
There was no problem with nuclear cooling demands, the problem was if the nuclear plants put more heat into the rivers, it would be bad for the wildlife living there.
Honestly what we really need is something that we can pump that power into (not a battery - something productive I mean) so we can keep those reactors at higher efficiency levels. I do not know what that is but surely vast amounts of extra power could be used for something useful no? Research? Cleaning the air? Hot tubs for Walruses?
Excess power is most usefully applied capturing CO2 and desalinating water. But nukes' operating cost is too high for that. Spending a single year's operating cost on solar, and then using solar to do that work,leaves you with all subsequent years' opex available to use building out more solar.
Swedish nuclear reactors are all located at the North Sea or Baltic sea that's cold enough all year round, we don't have that issue.
This is mostly an issue for ("partially") landlocked countries. Those french reactors use rivers for cooling. Also the summer period neatly coincides with the yearly maintenance period, so...
This was to prevent the water in the rivers from heating up past the point where it's safe for wildlife. Nuclear plants that use ocean water for cooling don't have this problem.
In my neck of the woods (50 deg North, not as North as Sweden), I get a reasonable amount of sunlight. Let's just imagine that 1/3 of the days during winter I get 5 hours of sunlight. I'm going to ignore electricity and just concentrate on heating, because heat is way easier to store. From my meter readings, in the depths of winter I seem to use an average of 2.2kW-worth of gas, most of which goes to the boiler for hot water and heating. Some of it would go to cooking, but I'm guessing not much.
So, if I wanted to collect that much heat from solar, assuming I get 5 hours every 3 days, I would need to collect 2.2×72/5 = 32kW while the sun is shining and then store it for use later. Sunlight is just over 1kW per square metre, so I'd have to have about 32 square metres of parabolic mirrors concentrating light onto a black water pipe. The South-facing side of my house is easily that big.
Then storing it. Water is extremely good at storing heat. Water stores 4194J for each kilogram for each degree centigrade in temperature. If I were to get five 2.4m×1.2m×10cm polyurethane foam insulation boards, I could build an insulated box capable of taking a 2000l hot water tank, which could be put in a shed or something. If that were heated to 90 degrees centigrade, it would be able to return 80kWh of heat before dropping to 55 degrees (which is the lowest acceptable temperature to run a heating system at, before you get Legionnaire's disease). The insulation would lose about 250W, which is small compared to the heat demand from the house.
Yes, there would be times when the stored heat runs out. A sensibly-designed system should hopefully be able to fall back onto the existing gas-fired heating when that happens.
So, these numbers are all very feasible. It'd cost a fair bit to achieve, but it would probably pay itself back within a couple of years, which is way quicker than PV. One of the key factors in that is efficiency and cost. Collecting solar heat is very efficient and uses cheap materials. PV is expensive and still not very efficient.
There are three main requirements for such a project: Enough sunlight when it is cold (and you can adjust the collecting surface area to compensate, so this basically means anywhere outside the polar circles). Enough space to put all the stuff (and as a corollary enough patience from family members to put up with it). And finally a suitable control system that pipes the heat around in an intelligent way, prevents the water tank being over-heated, falls back on gas when necessary, and satisfies the various building standards laws.
Always was. The most reliable product of the nuke industry has always been dishonesty. "Too cheap to meter..." No nuke has ever been operated anywhere in the world without massive subsidy.
There exists a group of folks who claim nuclear isn't green and is going to 'kill the planet'.
The alternative to nuclear is to either use fuels with a massive carbon footprint, or introduce a level of energy suffering on the population that is beyond the pale.
Funnily the rhetoric of nuclear proponents is always exclusively aimed against renewables not fossil fuels.
They know if not for ideological/political reasons/influence no nuclear plants will be build because it is just too expensive. If I can build double (now, the difference is rapidly increasing) the capacity using wind or solar why should I build nuclear? People who propose to do otherwise are the ones who are insane.
When you think a large group proposing something is collectively insane, it usually means you simply don't understand their argument.
Surely, you know that wind power has had a lot of trouble expanding in Sweden due to huge opposition from every community against building wind turbines on their land. Everyone likes the idea of wind power until they try to build a huge turbine on their backyard.
Sun power, in Sweden, in winter, is clearly not going to cut it... even in the southern areas that still get a little bit of sun in winter, you don't get nearly enough power.
Hydropower is great and Sweden produces lots of it, but again, highly unlikely it can build new damns with the current regulations.
The only options left seem to be coal and nuclear. I hope you don't propose to just use coal.
Nuclear power, while expensive to build, is reliable and plenty. No one proposing that it should be one of the options for countries like Sweden is insane.
Sweden has about the best options possible for a renewable powered grid. 40-50% of the electricity comes from hydro currently, simply transition that to be less baseload and more dispatchable, and Sweden now has days of storage.
Couple that with off-shore wind in one of the windiest places on earth[1] together with solar during the summer wind lulls and you have all you need.
This is why storage is not being built in Sweden, energy is simply too abundant and cheap.
We have a large scale war in Europe now with Russia threatening with nukes. We have attacks by unknown actor that destroyed gas pipelines.
From this one can see how the idea that somebody will bomb out a nuclear power station somewhere in Europe gets non-trivial probability.
So nuclear power really cannot be safe when this planet allows crazy guys to gain enough power.
As for coal then consider that an electric car that uses electricity from a modern coal plant with over 40% efficiency generates less CO2 than a gasoline or diesel car.
So rather than building nuclear power, the states should invest to upgrade older coal power plants from their 30-35% efficiency to 40-45% and quickly phase out petrol cars while expanding on renewables.
> So nuclear power really cannot be safe when this planet allows crazy guys to gain enough power.
This is an argument that ignores reality completely. How many attacks have there been against nuclear power plants by crazy guys even when we've had nuclear power throughout some of the most dangerous periods in history, including the Cold War and the current Ukrainian conflict?
Because you need to build 3x as much to have a safety net that the system will be operational and produce electricity with the same stability as a Nuclear Reactor, and that says nothing on the cost of storage.
Build all the solar, wind whatever you want. Doing so while ignoring the low return on energy security alone is a fools errand.
I’ve sat through meetings where carbon credits have been touted as the greatest weapon to transition the world away from fossil fuels. Carbon credits.
I’ve heard very reliable stories from China about business entities solely set up to generate unbelievable volumes of carbon credits to take advantage of this accounting trick.
I think the opposition you see is to the counterproductive moves of the past two or three decades where enormous amounts of money have been thrown at present renewable strategies and the world is worse off from an energy perspective.
I don't think that this is the general belief of most anti-nuclear activists, and certainly not most people who don't believe in nuclear as a solution. Many are concerned about waste disposal, accident potential, and proliferation. These are all valid concerns, even though their figures and arguments tend to be out of date.
They aren't better in Sweden. The right's support for it is not really related to the costs. I'm personally curious how it's going to pan out considering the right-wing parties claimed they'd be against state subsidies.
The single most reliable feature of all right-wing parties is that they are against state subsidies unless the subsidies are directed into their own pockets.
They are singularly skilled at directing subsidies reliably into their own pockets. Nukes and military procurement have worked well for that in past decades.
"unless the subsidies are directed into their own pockets"
This is ridiculously biased and not a constructive way to deal with political disagreements.
All political factions engage in rampant cronyism. To think it's confined to one faction is unbelievably naive.
Where do you think left wing parties receive the bulk of their campaign contributions from? It's members of public sector unions, who receive trillions of dollars in tax dollars every year in Europe.
Enerhodar is the town in which the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is located (only because the name of the town might not be as well known as the name of the power station).
Maybe the problem is requiring insanely high levels of safety from the nuclear industry, way higher than realistic in the current world that can and does kill people in myriad non-nuclear ways.
For example, I am willing to bet that nuclear-related deaths in the Ukrainian war will be a minuscule percentage of the total loss of life caused by said war.
the mayor issue is the coal/gas lobby, just look how europe was lobbed to the point that natural gas is somewhat "green", but nuclear is bad to the point some countries don't even have one nuclear power plant.
You assert that renewables projects do not start producing power before completion? I can cite hundreds that have done. I have never heard of a single nuke plant that produced before it was completed.
I was referring to the absurd claim that the oil and coal industry is pro-nuclear. If it wasn't for anti-science "environmentalists" we could have replaced ever single coal and gas power plant with nuclear by now.
Well solar is pretty much useless at these high latitudes. I believe the sun doesn't rise above 7 degrees in the winter in Stockholm. Though Sweden is blessed with mountains, so they can get significant energy from hydro. Here in Finland, Nuclear is the only real answer going forward.
The idea of nuclear power is good. The facts of nuclear power are much less good. It is not too much to ask that lifecycle costs and safety get addressed. For example, the French success with nuclear power looks much less successful due to decommissioning costs coming in at a multiple of estimated costs. The French low-balled their estimates, to be a fraction of estimates by Germany and UK. Which estimates do you believe?
Perhaps the latest attempt to construct a new nuclear plant in France has something to do with it?
Construction on a new reactor, Flamanville 3, began on 4 December 2007.[4] The new unit is an Areva European Pressurized Reactor type and is planned to have a nameplate capacity of 1,650 MWe. EDF estimated the cost at €3.3 billion[4] and stated it would start commercial operations in 2012, after construction lasting 54 months.[5] The latest cost estimate (July 2020) is at €19.1 billion, with commissioning planned tentatively at the end of 2022.
Oh wait, that was what Wikipedia said a year ago! Now it continues:
In January 2022, more delays were announced, with fuel loading continuing until mid-2023.[4][5]
Respectfully, it is because of the uncertainty in project approvals and financing to a large part.
In 2015, lawmakers made it mandatory to reduce Nuclear energy to 50% of existing installed capacity. So, pretty much all changes of mind post that point mean that previously shelved projects are re planned with FROM scratch with the new market rates.
I'm also a proponent of nuclear, but modern nuclear power plants seem to take 15-20 years to construct and typically go 10s of billions of EUR over budget. So one does not simply "build a reactor".. look at Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, Flamanville 3 in France and Hinkley Point C in UK.
Looking at the ratio between installed capacity and actual output of wind turbines, this seems like a faulty calculation. 40GW of installed wind capacity will get you a small percentage of 40GW of guaranteed output. Roughly as much as you get from the nuke. The surplus (when there is enough wind) has to be either burned off, compensated, or stored. Storage technology is nowhere near the scale that would be needed. Compensation is done typically using natural gas (see Germany). And burning off is what is done before the gas powerstations kick in.
Personally, I would like people to just build wind capacity first and burn the surplus off if need be, until we have the storage in place.
But calculations that rely on the assumption that installed wind capacity is somehow equivalent to the installed capacity of more reliable sources, doesn't help planning for the future.
The ratio of installed capacity and actual output is called load factor.
It’s typically 30% for wind power. That’s still 12GW.
40 billion should be enough for one Hinkley point C type reactor, having 3 GW capacity. Mind you that especially one nuclear reactor is not reliable either having to shut down for maintenance. France for example only gets a load factor of 77% out of their nuclear reactors.
I'm not talking about the average load factor, but the minimum output of the installations. This varies from region to region. At e.g. https://www.smard.de you can easily see the range for wind in Germany. The recent data shows such a minimum at the Oct 12 mark. Anything above that needs to be accounted for. You can also very easily see how gas power stations kick in during lulls. Because that is how it is currently accounted for in Germany (plus the aforementioned burning off of excessive energy to deal with short term spikes etc).
That minimum is, at least for Germany, nowhere near 30% of installed capacity. It's just a few percent. And that's how 40GW are in reality just about one or two GW of guaranteed power. The rest will get burned off or you need a very flexible alternative energy source.
A year ago I would have said that to be gas. Seemed like a good fit for wind. Had Germany converted all its coal and nuclear plants to wind/solar + gas, however, the current situation would be more dire than it already is today.
The most reliable way seems to be to accompany wind with storage. A lot of storage. But that's a long term solution. Short to mid term you need alternative reliable sources. If you don't want to go with coal, nuclear is the only remaining option. So I can't blame the Swedes for going that way.
How is that different from nuclear? Half of France's power plants are offline. That's not reliable at all. Building new nuclear power plants also takes too long.
We're talking about Sweden that has high amounts of hydro power available for storage.
France didn't maintain their nuclear plants during COVID-19 and as a result suffer the consequences now (or rather all of Europe). Furthermore the heat has only made for less than half percent of lost production.
Twitter, something so “valuable” which offers virtually nothing of value to humanity. If twitter was turned off there would be some whinging for a week on some other platform and then it would be forgotten…
A bit of context, the south area which this reactor is suggested to be built in has occasionally a 1000% electricity higher price from the northern regions. A big reason for this is that prices in the south is highly connected to markets that the south region is connected to, and those region are heavily importers of electricity creating a higher demand than there is available of cheap energy. For example, in order to address this there is a oil power plant operating basically 24/7 and does so very profitably even with high oil prices.
Another factor affecting the price is that, while there's a lot of hydropower generated in northern Sweden, there's not enough capacity for transferring energy to the south where most consumption is. The investors building industry in the north that can use cheap renewable energy don't seem to mind though. :)
So how are they able to transfer electricity to Finland, Poland, Germany etc but not from north to south sweden?
Completely unnecessary rules were put in place to create submarkets for north and south sweden, and it's these rules that disallow the transfer of the electricity. It's more profitable to limit production to keep prices high in sweden, then export and sell in other countries.
Hydro in sweden was overflowing and forced to produce more electricity in sweden during the fall, prices would be zero and even negative if supply and demand was actually in effect, but this would mean zero profits as well, so it's not allowed.
Transmission capacity from the northern hydro to the southern nuclear regions has decreased due to the closing of reactors in the south. Power transmission is more complex than just building a fatter pipe to pour more water through. Having stable power in the south is a prerequisite to transfer hydro power from the north.
I don't understand, surely the southern grid is stabilized by interconnections to europe? I thought closing reactors would be independent of transmission. What am I missing?
They are separate grids: not synchronous, not stabilising each other. Most of the interconnections are HVDC links. Wikipedia has an article on synchronous grids of Northern Europe.
The decommissioning of several large generating stations in southern Sweden has indeed affected the effective transmission capacity from the north.
Tell that to Germans https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suedlink (started planning in 2011, the construction should have taken place 2016-2022, now they are hoping it will be done by 2028, lots on NIMBY court challenges along the route of the cabling).
But they get better price for their electricity, more profit for the plant, more taxes and thus the people benefit.
Yes, local electricity bill would go up but if the price is often extremely low, selling some for higher price is a net win. Ie this is why we have trade as concept in the first place.
Yes, the overall economy does better, but the local people might get higher electric bills but little other benefits, as the profit goes to the power plants. Usually increased tax revenue is less than the increased cost for the consumer.
Ironically, this is why the interconnects to mainland Europe that let (southern) Sweden sell its electricity at high prices when there is demand elsewhere are a good thing for everyone involved.
Not a good sign when right-wing governments are complaining about market based price signals and trade.
No, not everyone involved, everyone that can’t afford the bill in Southern Sweden, it is not good for them.
Just because Germany destroyed their electrical system it should not mean that companies in Sweden should go bankrupt. Germany tampered with the EU market, they ought to pay fines.
As more nuclear power plants are built, we will be building up expertise to make them safer. This AP1000 design already is much more inherently safe than Gen 1 or 2 reactors
Also, a lot of the new energy needs comes from "green steel", which would give massive reduction in the green house gas production required to produce steel.
But for that to make sense we need lots of clean energy.
Transmission lines increase the end customer costs (a lot). They are necessary but you want as little of them as you can get away with. Obviously not having enough can also increase costs as you have to use very expensive forms of production to compensate.
Here in Finland the transmission costs before this current price hike were usually 50%+ (for me with my current fixed price contract they are around 60%) of the total electricity bill. We got a really good network but it does come with a cost.
Do you know if redispatch costs are included as part of your transmission costs and how much they are? Because if they are, then investing into the transmission lines can decrease transmission costs since the providers need to pay less for redispatch.
In the globalisation/market liberalism mindset it's traditionally considered good if places with high supply and low demand export to areas where products fetch higher prices.
True but not when the upkeep of that infrastructure costs more than the profits you get from selling your high supply product in the far away high demand market.
Obviously with the current market prices the cost of the transmission capabilities is a rounding error but if we get back to the electricity prices of a year or two ago the costs of transmission could start to dominate the price again so you have to be careful about investments like this (just like you have to be with nuclear plants for the case that the price on the markets is goes permanently under your production costs)
And transmission capability upgrades are really long term investments. Sweden started lately to try and fix this issue. If that project finishes on time it will take 14 years to finish. These are the kind of timescales where building a new nuclear power plant can be a faster fix.
You mean Svenska Kraftnät (SVK) instead of Vattenfall, they're the ones making money from electricity distribution. Vattenfall is an electricity producer, it's not responsible for this kind of distribution across borders. It is responsible for some distribution within Sweden (regionnät), but there it is not the only player. SVK on the other hand is 100% owned by the state.
That sounds strange, when there's a shortage of power, don't the higher electricity prices go mostly to the energy producers, in order to create incentive to increase production and start up more expensive generation forms?
And Denmark and Germany in turn are very connected to countries reliant on French nuclear power. Only half of French nuclear power plants are currently running.
Wouldn't this be affected by the EU principle of paying energy at the highest cost of production? [0]
Unless the power plant would be able to flood the rest of the EU grid with cheap power to the point that the more expensive plants would be turned off, how would this prevent the price going up?
In the south of Sweden there is a general shortage of energy to the point where reserve energy operators have to jump in to supply energy. Those are basically the most expensive energy production you can have. In addition there is a speculative market so available energy production can be bought at one price point and then sold at a higher, making the speculative provider a even higher "cost of production".
If however there is a energy surplus in a region then two things happens. Reserve operators don't need to be used, and the speculative market risk holding energy that they can't sell, thus forcing lower prices.
New export cables will be ready the day these would come online, if the ever come online. Decoupling the SE4 and SE3 regions from the European energy market will never be a sustainable solution due to the possible arbitrage.
> For example, in order to address this there is a oil power plant operating basically 24/7 and does so very profitably even with high oil prices.
This is not why the oil plant exists, it is an emergency plant. If it is running 24/7 then it does so because the oil plant is profitable. Not out of necessity.
Not really. It is part of the Swedish capacity reserve during winters, i.e. the national grid operator pays it to be in standby to ensure the reliability of the grid.
Its current operations are because even though it is an expensive oil plant it is profitable to run it for export on the European market.
A Swedish professor in energy systems looked closer at the electricity export compared to the operation of the plant, and out of hundreds of hours operated during this year something like 1-5 hours were not matched by equal or more electricity being exported than it produced.
While interesting its scope is in the typical Swedish narrow mindedness. Solidarity, the Swedish mantra, a very watered out word here. We are part of EU (Union) comes with some conditions or was it started just for sake of profit?
A bit of a weird tangent, I don't see how this is related to the topic? A private company operates this plant, it will run the plant if it's profitable. It has absolutely nothing to do with "solidarity".
Agree, off topic. Solidarity was in reference to other members of the union. Which I thought had some weight as to why the plant ran in first place. I’m not knowledgeable in this but since it affects me greatly tried to understand the problem in more detail last few months.
I didn't say "all things that are profitable are necessary" nor that "profitability" and "necessity" were synonyms. What I said was that the root cause of what makes this particular power plant profitable is the same root cause that makes it necessary.
This is only half the story. What is actually happening is that Sweden is importing expensive electricity from the baltics and exporting it to Germany. So even though the electricity is only in "transit" through Sweden, the prices go up in southern Sweden. Obviously everything is working as designed, but it does feel a bit unfair.
To lower the prices in southern Sweden either southern Sweden or northern Germany must increase "plannable" electricity production to avoid expensive imports from the baltics.
That is not specially accurate. Sweden only import from the Baltic countries plus Polen 20 + 42 GWh but Sweden export to those countries 3229 + 2747 GWh. So the import per year is only 1% of the export.
The total export from Swedens to all of its neighboring countries is 23712GWh and the import is only 2957GWh. So Sweden export much much more than it imports. So saying Sweden is just a transit land is not accurate.
Why the electricity is expensive is because the electrical grid is connected to northen europe and the expensive prices there makes the prices also goes up in Sweden because it is the same market.
Germany also is just a transit country, producing more electricity than consuming. The problem is that half of Frances nuclear power plants aren’t running of which also surrounding countries like Italy are usually reliant on.
In order to inform the conversations in these comments here are some predictions on Nuclear vs Renewable usage in the UK grid from the National Grid's (UK energy grid transmission network owner + operator) Future Energy Scenarios report - https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/263951/download
The funny thing about a country like Sweden is that their energy problem is 100% based on energy exports to the EU market. Sweden produces way more electricity than it needs at any given time. During one of the latest “crises” a single company exported energy worth several hundreds of millions Euros to other countries.
Sweden also has an imbalance problem due to a lack of transmission capability. After shutting down nuclear plants in the south that kept the grid balanced, there are now times where the transmission from the north (where the hydro power is) to the south is at capacity. So the country as a whole has generation, but can't get it to where it needs to be.
Yes, there are problems with the infrastructure. Some predict the same thing that happens in the south of Sweden will start to happen in the capital region.
Electricity prices should include all the negative externalities such as pollution, carbon dioxide, destruction of habitats, geopolitical dependence on Russia etc.
Electricity, like an increasing bunch of other things, is part of the infrastructure. The amount and different levels of infrastructure pretty much define "civilization", do away with infrastructure and your civilization is done for. Which also means that the way a civilization treats its infrastructure tells you a lot about this civilization.
If you look at Europe, they messed things up big time. Firstly, running infrastructure like a company will never work, by design. So this whole privatization is a big sham to begin with. It is made worse by the fact that there cannot be a market as such, so they defined rules to create a market. Humans being exactly that are too stupid to include the human factor into rules, so this whole "market" is completely and utterly broken, and pretty much a money transfer machinery (like so many others) from the bottom to the top.
Which means in the end, while I can understand your idea/approach, but it will not solve the problem with energy cost.
But I think it will, and we see this already happening. Currently, the electricity price is so high that it makes economic sense to build wind and solar that are better for the environment.
I'm not saying it should be an unregulated free market - we've seen those don't work (exactly because of the externalities). But this does not mean there cannot be regulated markets and partial markets. The grid is infrastructure that shouldn't be run as a company, but production and storage capacity can be bought from markets as long as the grid rules factor in the externalities.
But the energy market is not natural, it is completely artificial, based on rules which are more befitting to a non-market setup. For example, Europe has the largest (not in size but connected power) synchronized grid in the world. That means you cannot just run some solar cells and connect them to the network, this is controlled externally. Which completely breaks this "demand and supply" already, not to talk about how the energy price is formed.
Read: You cannot even run this as an unregulated market, it wouldn't work. That requires every company having its own electricity grid, and for example the possibility that your house has 10 different power connectors available, so you can actually choose which one to pick. That is conceptually broken. And just the grid as infrastructure doesn't work, either, because of reasons outlined above.
Maybe forcing the idea of a market on everything is a dogma which we should eradicate out of our heads, the sooner the better.
It's easy to implement through regulation, just pass a law that says it costs peanuts. But this easily results in shortages (if production is unsubsidized) or tax hikes / lower living standards (if production or import is subsidized using money that could be spent elsewhere).
Here is the full agreement from the new coalition in power. Below "3. Reformer som ska genomföras i projektet". I am very happy with these reforms, it looks like exactly what is needed.
The only green solution to our current energy problem is more nuclear power plants. We have to stop relying on coal, wood, oil, gas and the rest of the “dirty” materials.
Except nuclear is expensive and takes decades to build, runs on non renewable materials (a good percentage of which come from Russia), leaves waste that is deadly for 100.000s of years, and promising new technologies will need decades to reach maturity.
Now why is it so great compared to, say, solar or geothermal?
Geothermal doesn't really work for most places, since you'd have to drill down for tens of kilometres to get the required temperature. If you can use it then great, but it's a rarity.
> Now why is it so great compared to, say, solar
Works at night, works in winter, doesn't take up half the country in surface area, has a constant output throughout the day, costs slightly less per kWh (may vary), provides waste heat that can be used for central heating, etc.
Now sure if you live on the equator where it's always sunny and happen to have a large reservoir nearby you can use for pumped hydro storage, then yes it's probably the better choice.
> doesn't take up half the country in surface area
Surprisingly, this argument is wrong. I have once verified the math for replacing all of vehicles in Germany with electric vehicles. Charged with 100% solar. The required surface area for solar farms would be about a tenth of what is currently used for the ethanol additive for unleaded (used typically in personal cars, AFAIK freight and public transport run on diesel without such additive).
But yeah, according to EU studies a zero-emission grid with nuclear for base load is way cheaper than without it.
> about a tenth of what is currently used for the ethanol additive for unleaded
To be fair, that is a metric fuckton of land to start with. In the end there's only so many watts per square meter available and a physical limit on conversion efficiency, so you eventually have to expand outwards to to compensate for ever growing demand + land used for battery capacity (which may or may not be negligible). Meanwhile population increases also keep continuously driving up the scarcity of land.
Sounds like an interesting calculation though, do you still have any notes on that?
Oh wait! And will stop working if your rivers should run dry, as happened in France this summer.
Oh and! May not be so easy to build, supposing not everyone loves the technology as much as you do. Google Wackersdorf.
Edit: of course, you assume you’d be able to run your power plants safely throughout their life span, even if cough a natural disaster were to occur nearby.
> France’s nuclear safety authority (ASN) set temperature and river flow limits beyond which power stations must reduce their production, to ensure the water used to cool the plants will not harm wildlife when it is released back into the rivers.
It's just an conservative artificial limit set to ensure that Nuclear is indeed the most ecological source of power since it even has higher standard than anything else.
This argument sounds like "oh, in the end it doesn't matter, we can just continue on!". But this is completely wrong. You cannot dump 50°C hot water into rivers without consequences, and very far reaching consequences at that. They are already very very borderline, because we are talking about something slowly creeping towards 30°C already, in large quantities.
Which also means you have to plan accordingly for all the new nuclear power plants, otherwise you are building a new ruin, pretty much. For the "near" future you can assume the dry and hot periods will continue like that, which means that long term projects like nuclear power plants have to be planned accordingly. Considering the accelerated progress of climate change that should include a lot of risk "buffer", if not a different approach to deal with the cooling water, for example.
I could say the same about your comment! The ocean is a big place with more than a billion billion liters of water, you can't meaningfully heat it up with a power plant.
With that logic, you couldn't build any power plant with air cooling either since it would heat up the air.
If you want to make a general argument against all power generation that's fine, but singling out ocean cooling specifically doesn't make sense - especially since ocean and air temperatures obviously affect each other.
The main advantage of nuclear power plants is constant power output at basically zero emissions combined with a super small footprint. Having a constant power output is worth a lot, that's why it makes sense funding them.
If you think that, let's say Germany, could generate all its electricity demand from renewables, then I'd recommend you to take a look at the following book (free): www.withouthotair.com/
I agree, the book is a little outdated with regards to PV panels pricing and efficiency. However, the solar constant remains the same and so does the problem with the intermittent nature of solar power production.
Don't get me wrong, I very much support renewables. I just don't see how renewables could supply our entire energy demand without sufficient energy storage capacity. That's why I think a hybrid solution that includes nuclear power plants is the way to go.
how did people build nuclear reactors in the 50s then?
Calder Hall was run for 50 years, well past its 20 year expected lifespan. they shut it down because they thought coal, oil and gas would be cheap forever.
the gen2 reactors were even better and more efficient.
gen2 reactors like the rbmk are still running today and producing economical and safe power.
why would nuclear power today be more expensive, take longer to build, and be less safe than technology from the 1960s?
I don’t think anyone is saying that it’s less safe, it’s just that our standards (and fear) have increased. 1960s vehicles didn’t have airbags, now we don’t buy cars without them.
They were cheaper than solar and wind in the 1950s. Now solar and wind is cheaper. It's not that nuclear doesn't work. It's that it's a worse solution.
I don't have a suitable answer to your question but I wanted to mention that I also wonder how come there isn't more discussion about implementing/improving tidal or wave power. There are numerous innovations that might be possible in the horizon, including possibly using fusion, but other alternate approaches such as decentralization and energy storage are also interesting yet seldom discussed.
Well, I agree with you that they’re expensive and take time to build, but they don’t leave that much waste compared to what we’ve been told and their materials have more or less the same problems as the ones from renewable ones (batteries, non recyclable blades, exotic materials for solar…).
I fully support solar, hydro, geo, wind and any other more eco friendly ways, but they don’t generate stable electricity and with the needed capacities our modern society needs.
I’ve read articles about different ways to store clean electricity and ways to convert coal burning plants with geothermal ones, but I feel that these are not enough.
We (as a planet) need a lot of clean electricity as soon as possible or we’re screwed :-)
Right, there is never any legitimate justification to build new nukes.
At the moment, existing nukes can still be operated at competitive marginal cost, neglecting original capital cost, and carefully not counting continuing subsidies in opex. As renewables costs continues on down, even just nukes' subsidized opex will be unsustainable.
The main effect of this is electricity prices going up. It's completely ideological, Vattenfall the company running nuclear power plants wanted to shut down the reactors because they were not economically viable.
The irony is that Sweden is ideally suited for going 100% renewable. The North has lots of hydro (which is essentially storage) and the south has lots of windy coastline. But if you go around Sweden the number of wind turbines is tiny. In the Gothenburg area I'm aware of maybe 10 (only one is really close).
Sweden (unlike Denmark or Germany) never really invested in renewables. If they would have invested in wind like those countries (and let the north south connections go to rot) they would be fully renewable already. I suspect the 40B would also pay for enough wind to achieve that goal.
The effect of not having enough planable energy production is that prices go up and that the energy industry starts gradually worse power plants. So you have the oil powered plants in the south, spewing out CO2. The reason why this "works" is because a number of countries in the vicinity have large needs for energy in the aftermath of having shut down their planable energy production. (Both coal plants and nuclear plants.)
The swedish nuclear plants were not shut down because they were not economically viable, this is as they say _fake news_. A special tax and a number of new fees were introduced by the swedish green party that prevented economic viability. Plus: further development of more modern technology was prevented actively and also indirectly because of political risk and a lack of stability for such investments.
The hydro power is in the north and cannot be transported to the south for a number of both technical reasons (too much losses with lines that long) and a lack of capacity.
The wind power has to be stored in batteries (or other similar technology) in order for there to be energy available when there's not enough wind blowing. These are problems that are actually hard to solve and that also have plenty of bad consequences for the environment. Not being able to acknowledge this is the real ideological fallacy here.
In fact: there is already "too much" wind farm capacity in relation to storage capacity and immediate power needs, as is evident when the price drops way below viability for the plants themselves (and sometimes into negative territory.) When this happens, the wind farms run huge losses _and so does all the other plants_. And when there is no wind, the wind farms rack up losses again.
Energy management in Sweden is a lot more complex and nuanced than thinking that what's happening now in regards to a want for nuclear power production is some sort of bad ideology.
> The effect of not having enough planable energy production is that prices go up and that the energy industry starts gradually worse power plants. So you have the oil powered plants in the south, spewing out CO2. The reason why this "works" is because a number of countries in the vicinity have large needs for energy in the aftermath of having shut down their planable energy production. (Both coal plants and nuclear plants.)
Actually this year many countries were pushing energy to France were most nuclear plants were not operational for maintanance and heat.
> The swedish nuclear plants were not shut down because they were not economically viable, this is as they say _fake news_. A special tax and a number of new fees were introduced by the swedish green party that prevented economic viability.
Are you saying Vattenfall did not shut down ringhals because they said they are not commercially viable? You are directly contradicting their own words (In October 2015, Vattenfall decided to close down Ringhals 1 by 2020 and Ringhals 2 by 2019 due to their declining profitability, instead of, as previously announced, around 2025.[16][5] from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringhals_Nuclear_Power_Plant)
Or are you saying it was because of the introduction of the Swedish Nuclear Waste Fund? I would argue that paying for waste storage should be part of the operating cost (just as CO2 costs should be covered by coal operators btw).
>Plus: further development of more modern technology was prevented actively and also indirectly because of political risk and a lack of stability for such investments.
You mean they could not find investors on the open market because they deemed it too risky with questionable returns, without government guarantees. Is that not how the free market is supposed to operate?
> The hydro power is in the north and cannot be transported to the south for a number of both technical reasons (too much losses with lines that long) and a lack of capacity.
HVDC has 3% power loss over 1000km HVAC has 6%, losses are not the problem.
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
You are correct capacity of those lines is a problem though, maybe some investments are in order?
> The wind power has to be stored in batteries (or other similar technology) in order for there to be energy available when there's not enough wind blowing. These are problems that are actually hard to solve and that also have plenty of bad consequences for the environment. Not being able to acknowledge this is the real ideological fallacy here.
What are the bad environmental consequences? Also offshore wind has a capacity factor of 60% that is similar to nuclear.
> In fact: there is already "too much" wind farm capacity in relation to storage capacity and immediate power needs, as is evident when the price drops way below viability for the plants themselves (and sometimes into negative territory.) When this happens, the wind farms run huge losses _and so does all the other plants_. And when there is no wind, the wind farms rack up losses again.
That just points to a huge market opportunity. If the wind turbines have to pay "huge" amounts when the wind is high, I just need to store that energy and make twice the money.
> Energy management in Sweden is a lot more complex and nuanced than thinking that what's happening now in regards to a want for nuclear power production is some sort of bad ideology.
Funny, usually it's the nuclear proponents saying it's all straight forward and the opponents are just ideologically motivated.
> Are you saying Vattenfall did not shut down ringhals because they said they are not commercially viable? You are directly contradicting their own words
Both statements are true.
They weren't commercially viable because if the extra taxes the government introduced.
So yes they were shut down because they were too expensive, and yes the government indirectly shut them down by making them too expensive.
> Actually this year many countries were pushing energy to France were most nuclear plants were not operational for maintanance and heat.
This is not in any way in contradiction to what I'm saying. In fact: this supports my case. Because the amount of nuclear power generation is down, prices surge. This is my point. Your point was the opposite, remember? More nuclar power will increase prices?
> Are you saying Vattenfall did not shut down ringhals because they said they are not commercially viable? You are directly contradicting their own words (In October 2015, Vattenfall decided to close down Ringhals 1 by 2020 and Ringhals 2 by 2019 due to their declining profitability, instead of, as previously announced, around 2025.[16][5] from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringhals_Nuclear_Power_Plant)
If you read what I said, I said that nuclear power was artifically made inviable because of extra charges and taxes. It was perfectly viable and economically sound before these.
> You mean they could not find investors on the open market because they deemed it too risky with questionable returns, without government guarantees. Is that not how the free market is supposed to operate?
Right, because the political climate is such in Sweden that there is risk in investing in this, there won't be any interest in investing in this area. I said this as well. A free market would work here but we don't have one. The reason for government guarantees at this point is as an offset to the perceived political risk. A nuclear powerplant is a 20-40 year investment and if there's a very large risk that a populist government were to negate this in 5-10 years, then noone wants to invest in it. This is where we are.
> HVDC has 3% power loss over 1000km HVAC has 6%, losses are not the problem. From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current You are correct capacity of those lines is a problem though, maybe some investments are in order?
Losses are part of the problem, yes more investment here is needed but this is not the biggest problem. Another commenter here mentioned the fact that because there isn't enough capacity to _receive_ the transfers, they can't be made. This is to do with the lack of inertial reserve(?) (svängmassa) after having switched off so many large powerplants over the years.
> What are the bad environmental consequences? Also offshore wind has a capacity factor of 60% that is similar to nuclear.
I'm going to have to call that 60% number.
The consequences are visual (i.e.: ugly), noice, birds as well as the fact that they are niether degradable nor recyclable because of the types of material needed. Do note, though, that I am in no way anti wind power.
> That just points to a huge market opportunity. If the wind turbines have to pay "huge" amounts when the wind is high, I just need to store that energy and make twice the money.
Right. So you need batteries, we need improved tech in that department, someone has to make them and this requires a number of let's call them "troublesome materials." "I just need to store that energy" is as reasonable a thought as: we just need to feed them, about starving people. That just-word there is quite powerful.
> Funny, usually it's the nuclear proponents saying it's all straight forward and the opponents are just ideologically motivated.
Well I am not one of them. You started out with the big I-word here and it is my honest opinion that it is better served the other way around, and for these reasons: a number of the problems we have in sweden with the power (and heat) generation is to do with the fact that we did turn away from nuclear power. The same can be said about Germany and both for the same reason: ideologically (or at least populistically) driven policies.
I'm not in love with nuclear power in the slightest. But it is one of the least bad solutions so we must really put away ideologically driven dreams and deal with reality. This is in regards to Sweden's current nuclear technology, which is to say, really old tech as it's basically from the 60:ies. Quite a lot has happend since and saying no to that without understanding the complexities and nuances to this and because Someone Puleaze think of the ch... environment? That's just poor judgement.
What's that myth that the wind stops blowing in winter. Seriously do you believe what you write or just make up things on the spot. Offshore wind has a capacity factor of 60% that's the same as nuclear (yes nuclear can't run 24/7 either) .
You're right that offshore Wind has a higher wind capacity, but the socialists wanted to build 4000 new on-land wind farms across the country. Also, the IEA even show in their report that Wind is the most resource-consuming power source of all alternatives available, because the blades cannot be recycled and have short life-span + the foundations require enormous amount of steel and miles of copper, plus power stations to function. While nuclear is among the least requiring, because facilities can be refurbished for new nuclear effectively.
What we need is a mix, but thinking that Wind can solely solve things are a bad idea, especially considering the very limited amount of minerals required and what is available.
One question for nuclear advocates, as I know it's full on-trend at the moment:
What's to stop adversaries holding countries to ransom using their nucealer facilities?
Just like Russia is playing "games" around the Ukranian nuclear plant?
What's to stop that being used as the new threat? We won't turn your gas off, we'll threaten your nuclear plants?
> What's to stop adversaries holding countries to ransom using their nucealer facilities?
Nothing, unless you yourself have leverage. Every resource or dependency is a potential weakness. The idea is to be able to say "ok, if you bomb our fission plant, we'll shut off your fresh water supply."
> But doesn't chess rely on two half-decent actors sitting down across a table from each other?
No? People play "chess" all the time without sitting down at a board. You're twisting the metaphor.
> Clearly some actors are willing to throw the board across the room
And like I said, there would be consequences for that.
> In which case, why are 'we' considering creating that weakness?
Having a large body of fresh water is a weakness. Maybe we should send it all away to another country...?
> I understand there is a strong wave behind nuclear right now, but it does feel like we're just creating the instruments of another, different, mess.
The mess has already been created. It's called an enormous population of 8 billion people. How do you produce all the things they need without destroying the planet? There are more existential issues at hand than "well, nuclear is a perfect energy source, but people who don't like us might hurt our energy production so we should just do ..."
Do what instead? Any power source can be attacked. I don't even get your position here. The only way to mitigate attack is complete distribution. Solar is great for that, but unfortunately unbelievably underpowered to drive the entire productive system. If you want a happy medium, then smaller, modular nuclear reactors would be the way to go.
That's a small part of their sins. The big part is relying on gas for heating. When speaking with germans I've found that they think of gas as "clean" which sounds insane to me. Yeah, maybe locally, compared to coal, but it's their largest co2 emission source nevertheless.
I don't know anyone in germany who thinks gas is "clean". New buildings are built with heat pumps. They are considered clean if used with renewable energy.
But it's difficult to use them in old buildings and gas is said to be to most cleanest heating technology based on fossil fuels.
The cited article says "a bridge for a limited transition period" and not "green energy".
So no, they don't want to label it green energy, they only prefer it to other fossil fuels and nuclear but the goal is to phase out natural gas as well.
Heat pumps are amazing and a big step forward, but Germany's electricity is energized by natural gas peaker plants when there is not enough wind or solar generation operating.
Even if every German building was using heat pumps, they would still be burning TONS of natural gas to keep the electricity flowing consistently, because they have no long term energy storage solution to pair with renewables, especially through the long, dark winters when the sun rarely shines.
You imagine there is no plan because you do not know about the plans.
It would be stupid to build storage there is not renewable generating capacity to charge. When there is such capacity, they will then build out storage. In the meantime the correct place to spend is on generation. Which, in fact, is what they are doing.
The emergency measures are needed because the peacetime policy was not designed to be resilient. A better peacetime policy would have obviated the need for destructive emergency measures.
The peacetime policy was to build renewable capacity. Now there is radically more renewable capacity than before, much more than if another direction had been chosen.
If 30% coal today is bad, >>30% coal, the alternative, would have been correspondingly worse.
Yeah the plan was to buy methane gas from Russia instead. Still a non renewable source, but the gas would have caused less CO2 emissions and less pollution (gas causes less CO2 per kilowatt hour). Of course, the war and the bombings of NordStream have put an end to that.
The gas would have been used to fill in while renewables were being built out. Now coal is filling in while renewables are being built out even faster.
Without the investment to date in wind, coal dependency would have been massively greater.
Yeah, note that a lot of those renewables won't be built in Germany but outside of it, as there is simply no capacity for this in Germany.
While Germany is a net exporter for electricity, it does import a large chunk of its total energy usage (electricity plus stuff like fuel for cars, heating, et). Stuff like coal or gas or oil. In 2017, it was from 70% of imports and 30% from energy harvested locally [0]. It's quite impossible that this can all be converted to renewable power sources originating in Germany.
So what will likely/hopefully happen is that the closer partner countries will supply electricity to Germany via cables, while countries from further away will send Hydrogen generated from renewable sources, that will then be burned in the already existing gas plants.
I don't think most reasonable people count biomass in with renewable (at least not large scale biomass). e.g. this website https://grid.iamkate.com/ has biomass in "other" along with nuclear and pumped hydro storage.
The wood pellet power used in the UK is pretty sketchy.
Even in the best case, when you cut down a tree, burn it, and plant a replacement you've still released a bunch of carbon into the atmosphere. So carbon in the atmosphere will be raised for 20-50 years.
When people have looked into the source of these wood pellets the claims of the pellet companies often don't line up with official records - like saying they didn't log an old-growth forest, when they held the logging license at the time it was logged. Or claiming they only use sawdust and low-quality wood, when their output volume is much greater than the amount of low-quality wood you'd expect [1].
And supposedly the trees get replanted - but the company doing it got paid when the pellets were delivered. If in 5 years time they decide to do something else with the land, they can do.
The government turns a blind eye to this to hit their 'renewables' targets.
> Even in the best case, when you cut down a tree, burn it, and plant a replacement you've still released a bunch of carbon into the atmosphere. So carbon in the atmosphere will be raised for 20-50 years.
Global warming is a global, long term issue.
Focusing on a single tree is pretty much the canonical opposite of the wrong perspective to bring to it.
For the replanting side to work, growing fuel trees needs to be profitable. When it is, capitalists will replant out of greed, and the system will hum along by itself.
In theory, but an unfortunate amount of biomass burnt in Europe is old growth forest being cut down in the US and shipped across the Atlantic. So renewable, but it would take hundreds of years to renew, and likely won't be renewed.\
Shutting down one of the cleanest and safest sources of electricity (nuclear fission) in favor of a natural gas enabled renewable grid with natural gas primarily supplied by Putin.
EU membership is pretty orthogonal to electricity markets and grid connections in Europe. For example in northern europe UK, Norway and Russia are connected to the nearby markets.
Now find out how to not just do it but do it quickly. The last time (two additional reactors in an existing plant) was built in 24 months and on budget.
Look at the most recently constructed nuclear plants in the USA, figure out who allowed that to happen, and and conspicuously give them public credit for their decisions.
> Georgia Power announced tonight that fuel load into the Vogtle Unit 3 reactor core has begun at Plant Vogtle near Waynesboro, Ga. The fuel load process marks a historic and pivotal milestone toward startup and commercial operation of the first new nuclear units to be built in the U.S. in more than three decades.
Look at the recent fiascos where $15B has already been spent and they say giving them another $10B will surely provide you with a 2GW plant, if you just wait enough years more. Or might not.
"Public credit" for these massive corruption festivals does not lead to good results.
The argument against nukes is that they are super-expensive compared to modern alternatives. The politicians who make nukes even more expensive are smart enough to get rich doing it.
Reactors will not be forced to shut down, in the future. Instead, they will be shut down as unable to produce power at a competitive price. Those that continue operating will depend even more on taxpayer subsidies than they do now.
The money that will be spent on these new reactors would buy a hell of a lot more wind power than these nukes could produce. But money for renewables would not go into the pockets of right-wing blueblood Swedes, which seems to be what matters to the incoming government.
When the nukes are mothballed early, every kWh they ever produced will, instantly, have actually cost much more than had been reckoned, as the fixed costs are amortized over fewer total.
Yes, this argument gets repeated again and again and again, and when you ask about storage you never get a decent answer. And yet, the argument keeps getting repeated even by people who matter and make the decisions. When I started watching debates in the Dutch house of representatives I pretty much lost all hope. Of the 150 members, I'd say 145 are either unable or unwilling to think quantitatively and do simple napkin math. Not just regarding energy policy but in all areas. Yet they are verbally very strong, which makes the problem even worse. I suspect it's the same in most western countries.
If you think I'm exaggerating, remember when the Royal Statistical Society asked "if you spin a coin twice, what is the probability of getting two heads?" and 47% of Conservative MPs and 77% Labour MPs got the answer wrong. Many technical people cannot even fathom this, and tend to assume that people who cannot answer such questions must be severely mentally impaired in general. That is completely wrong; you have lots of people who are near geniuses verbally but incapable of or unwilling to do quantitative thinking.
That's magical thinking. Let's start with the obvious question: what kind of storage would that be? Remember, your argument against nuclear was price. Have you run the napkin math on your preferred choice of storage?
> The decent answer is, simply, that storage will be built when there is enough renewable capacity to charge it from.
In your fantasy land a housing crisis is impossible!
The decent answer is that housing will be built there are enough construction materials to build them from. So a housing shortage will never happen.
What, Britain has housing shortage? Did they run out of clay to make bricks? Did they run out of buyers? Did they run out of money, while housing prices rose 10x? Did they run out of Land while 97% of the land is not built on? what could it be?
The most expensive serious storage solution is LiIon, and even that's merely the same cost (or at least, the bell curves of their prices mostly overlap) as an equivalent nuclear reactor.
(I'm deliberately ignoring any claims about future battery costs; while I'm expecting them to come down, they don't need to in order to make this argument).
Money is fictional - only raw resources, manufacturing fapacity and climate disaster are real.
I thought this should be clear to everyone today, when energy price whent up 10x because yoy can print euros but can't print jeoules of energy or natural gas.
Renewables and nuclear use different resources and manufacturing capacities.
Welcome to The new dark ages in Germany. Leading politicians even do not have any higher education: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricarda_Lang It’s scary how these people decide about topics they have no idea about.
Dr Angela Merkel holds a PhD in quantum physics. she stands by her cabinets decision to leave nuclear energy in densely populated Germany, as per a recent interview.
renewables will provide for 80% of Germanies energy needs by 2030, and close enough to 100% in 2050.
The last I read into Germany's plan to be "100%" renewable, it was using other countries in Europe to provide the base load using their hydro and nuclear. Which is great so long as they have excess to provide Germany I suppose.
There does not seem to be nearly enough construction of pumped storage or battery to cover the unevenness of German wind power. In fact, their prices have gone negative repeatedly in the past, which is not in fact a good thing. (OMG help, we'll pay anyone to take this power before the grid blows up!)
> we'll pay anyone to take this power before the grid blows up
that's not how that works.
also:
Dunkelflaute is 0.5% - 1.5% per year and only very rarely for longer than 24h. peaker power plants are turned off most of the time today and a combination of those and decentralized battery storage will easily buffer Dunkelflaute in Germany.
In fact, many believe that storage as hydrogen shows promise. There are many test plants for this right now in areas with a lot of wind and connection to the national gas grid.
The idea is that the hydrogen can then be used in existing gas power plants.
hydrogen has a relatively poor efficiency compared to battery storage electricity to store and back, and it's an highly flammable, infamously explosive gas. but it has a high energy density and it can be transported relatively well. hydrogen will find it's niche.
Hydrogen is one of many practical storage media. Many will be used, different ones favored in different places. Hydrogen is particularly suited for places with large, stable underground cavities.
It would be stupid to spend on storage before there is enough renewable generating capacity to charge it from. In the meantime they spend, sensibly, on renewable generating capacity.
By the time there is enough, storage will be massively cheaper. In the meantime, charging storage from gas or coal and then drawing it down is the same as burning gas or coal for immediate use, just with losses.
The storage should be built in conjunction with the renewable generation to avoid those excess grid damaging events which is just wasteful. Similar issue to US where constructing generation is being subsidised but not constructing storage along with it.
Batteries will probably be cheaper, but pumped hydro storage will probably cost about the same since it's a mature technology.
I could see Norway or Switzerland being major players in pumped hydro storage, given their geography.
Awhile back I did a bunch of math to try to figure out how much stored gravitational energy is in Lake Mead, and if I didn't make any major mistakes it came out to be about as much energy as the U.S. uses (as electrical energy) in 24 hours. The idea of moving that amount of water around on short time scales is hard to fathom.
The cost of batteries is actually rising, now that manufacturing costs only make up ~25% of a battery's cost [1]. The remaining 75% is raw materials, dominated by the cathode and anode, which are having trouble keeping up with demand [2].
Pumped storage is geographically limited: as more convenient sites are developed, viable locations become more and more remote. Hydroelectric storage is great, but not the pumped kind. The energy storage supplies by the Hoover dam, the Coolie dam, dwarf pumped hydro.
It's great for countries that have it, but you're not going to be storing much hydroelectricity outside of mountainous regions.
Edit: I've taken a closer look at your recent comments in other threads and it turns out you've been breaking the site guidelines so frequently and so aggressively that I've banned your account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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Original post:
Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? You've been posting tons of unsubstantive and flamebait comments and even (as here) crossing into personal attack. Besides being the sort of thing we ban accounts for, this has the disadvantage of discrediting your own view, which is a bad thing if you happen to be right.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. We've had to ask you about well over a dozen times in the past, which is not cool.
Edit: you've posted over 80 comments in this thread alone- most of them flamewar comments. That's extreme. Please don't do anything like that on HN again, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
Edit 2: you've been breaking the site guidelines badly in other threads recently too. As I said, we've warned you many times. If you keep it up we're going to have to ban you, so please fix this. It's seriously not ok.
Pumped storage requires a nearby hill with a lake on top of it (otherwise earth and concrete has to be poured to form an artificial reservoir), and a nearby lower reservoir, and a nearby source of water. And if it isn't close to transportation infrastructure, building a facility becomes prohibitively expensive. As the optimal sites are developed, less and less suitable sites need to be developed.
Why is New York building battery storage at $567/KWh [1] if pumped storage is so cheap?
There a vast amount of hydro storage potential in the Himalayas, but good luck developing any of it.
So just to make sure I'm understanding you: you insist that storage is a solved problem. It's solution is so obvious that anyone who doesn't agree it's an easy problem is trolling. But on the other hand, you are unwilling to mention how grid scale energy storage in a majority renewable grid will work.
The overwhelming majority of storage will not be batteries, unless a massively cheaper battery chemistry takes over.
Lake Mead stores (well, stored) radically less energy than mountaintop reservoirs with thousands of feet of "head" can hold behind cheap earthen dikes. Look up "penstock".
I suppose I should have clarified that I meant "lake Mead if at capacity" which it isn't.
Stored energy (in a fixed gravitational field) is the product of height and mass. Hoover dam has a "hydraulic height" of 576 feet according to a government website, though the average height of any given drop of water is less than that because the lake is deep (or it was, anyways).
The thing about lake Mead is that the volume of water is absolutely huge. I don't think there are any mountaintop reservoirs anywhere close to it because though the altitude difference could be a lot more, it's hard to store large amounts of water on a mountaintop.
If we estimate that the average height of water in Lake Mead is 400 feet and it holds 26 million acre feet, then a pumped hydro storage system with 4,000 feet of altitude difference would need to hold 2.6 million acre feet to be equivalent. I'm pretty sure there's nothing like that in the U.S. The Bath County Pumped Storage Station in Virginia has an upper reservoir of about 35.6 thousand acre feet and a vertical distance of 380 meters (1,246 feet).
There are dozens of such reservoirs in the Sierra Nevada range in California. None of them will take as much water as Lake Mead, but they don't need to.
Sweden has lots of high mountains that may have shallow reservoirs built cheaply on top of. Reservoirs with earthen dikes are radically cheaper than the sort of dams needed for traditional hydro power, and may be placed almost anywhere, because they do not need or destroy a watershed. Lots of small ones, placed close to users, are better than one big one like Lake Mead.
Is that the same interview in which she also stood by their decision to rely so heavily on Russian gas, even though the writing has been clearly on the wall since at least 2014?
first that's not what she said. she said given what the cabinet and western intelligence knew they considered it the right approach. and second, in hindsight some writing was on the wall in 2014.
however back then Germany was between a rock and a hard place for our energy supply and we simply added a new supply channel, in addition to US LNG and Saudi and Qatari LNG.
Pumped hydro storage, batteries, and/or long-distance grid interconnection. It's not often overcast in the Sahara, as far as I know, and solar power imported from far to the east and west can mitigate the day/night cycle problem.
It's reasonable to keep ICE power plants around as an emergency backup; if you have to use them for a week in January or when infrastructure breaks for whatever reason it's not the end of the world. Ideally things would run smoothly enough that they'd never be used.
It'd be expensive, but it's technically feasible. I'd also expect there's economies of scale involved; building a cable with twice the capacity doesn't cost twice as much; you might even just use the same cable and run it at a higher voltage.
Expensive but technically feasible, plus making Europe at the mercy of unstable regimes across the Mediterranean. That worked just fine with natural gas imports from Russia right?
At least Morocco/Algeria/Libya/Egypt/Tunisia don't have nuclear weapons or large conventional militaries and aren't generally much of a threat to anyone but themselves and sometimes their immediate neighbors.
There is a political risk that the governments of those countries change and they seize the energy-producing assets and sell surplus power to someone other than Europe. Perhaps a mutually-beneficial arrangement would be the best way to reduce the risk of it falling apart; for instance, if Morocco has the solar panels and Switzerland has the pumped-hydro storage facility to buffer out day/night cycles, both sides can trade power to their mutual benefit. Without both parts of the whole system, the other half is less useful.
Those things aren't equivalent. Useful nuclear fusion (i.e. more electrical power out than in) has not been demonstrated yet, and probably relies on techniques and technologies that haven't been invented yet.
On the other hand, we know how to make high-voltage DC transmission lines -- the only real questions are: how much will it cost, and is there some way we can do it better and cheaper?
There have already been DC lines over 2,000 miles long built that run at 800 kV or more. That's already long enough to reach several time zones away, and it's not a conceptual stretch to imagine linking several of these together to reach further. According to wikipedia:
> In 2010, ABB Group built the world's first 800 kV UHVDC in China. The Zhundong–Wannan UHVDC line with 1100 kV, 3400 km (2100 miles) length and 12 GW capacity was completed in 2018. As of 2020, at least thirteen UHVDC transmission lines in China have been completed.
> While the majority of recent UHVDC technology deployment is in China, it has also been deployed in South America as well as other parts of Asia. In India, a 1830 km (1140 mile), 800 kV, 6 GW line between Raigarh and Pugalur is expected to be completed in 2019.[58] In Brazil, the Xingu-Estreito line over 2076 km (1290 miles) with 800 kV and 4 GW was completed in 2017, and the Xingu-Rio line over 2543 km (1580 miles) with 800 kV and 4 GW was completed in 2019, both to transmit the energy from Belo Monte Dam. As of 2020, no UHVDC line (≥ 800 kV) exists in Europe or North America.
You are assuming geopolitical realities that will... never be reality. The entire issue of Germany's dependence on energy from another country makes this obvious.
You also assume that power plants can just be flipped on and off like a light switch. They can't.
Which country situated in Sahara would you consider to be stable enough politically, and unlikely to enter in geopolitical alliances that are adversarial to Europe, to place your primary energy infrastructure in?
in my book 98.5% easily fits the bill of "close to 100%"
so the answer is exactly what we do today: have a reserve capacity. part of that may even be traditional peaker power plants that remain turned off most of the year just like today.
I'd be curious about climate data on the distribution of Dunkelflaute duration, by region.
I believe the difference is that during a Dunkelflaute, peaker plants might have to generate a large amount of or the majority of electricity, whereas today, peaker plants are build to only generate relatively small amount of power at the margin.
So, we'd have to build a large number of peaker plants, which are really expensive in that they have to amortize their costs over a small amount of uptime.
short term weather forecasts are amazingly accurate. this allows us to deliberately "extend" the "range" of buffer storage. and even today in some situations some energy intense heavy industries have to pause production for a few hours if there is a lack of energy supply.
It's a political problem, not a technical one, and we do not, absolutely not have to build up new parallel peaker capacity. we can simply keep select plants alive.
The comment you are replying to was not "trolling"; it raised a legitimate, technical objection to a policy in a manner that invites constructive responses (for example, "with storage technology" is a common response I see).
Then it'd be good to mention what this storage mechanism is, and examples of existing commercial deployments said storage mechanism and their cost history. It's odd to see someone insist that the solution is so obvious that anyone who doesn't recognize it is trolling, yet they neglect to mention what that solution is.
Intermittency is one of the most difficult parts of building a majority renewable grid. Dismissing the biggest challenge in building a renewable grid as trolling is not a good look.
And what simple technical measure mitigates it in a cost effective manner? Hydroelectricity is one, but it's geographically dependent. Sweden already has about 30% of it's electricity coming from dams, but it still needs to built more nuclear plants to fulfill it's demand. And most countries have even less hydroelectric generation than Sweden.
Besides hydroelectricity, there's batteries which are not able to be built at scale. Then there's experimental solutions like compressed air, chemical storage, or giant flywheels. But none of those have been deployed commercially and thus there's no real-world cost history.
Proclaiming that the solution is simple, yet neglecting to actually specify it is not an effective way to make the case for storage. If you want to make the case for a plan to provision storage, make it and we can discuss that. But apparently, the solution is apparently so simple it defies explanation. How convenient!
Well in that case: we don't need fission, renewables, or storage. I know of a fusion breakthrough that will make electricity to cheap to meter! And it's so obvious I don't need to explain how it works, and anyone who doubts me is a troll.
Germany is a densely populated country. We already don't know where to put the nuclear waste. No one wants it on his or her doorstep. The cost of storage alone is a nightmare.
The nuclear exit was supported by the population and not decided against them by politicians.
And to your criticism: A lot of politicians in germany are lawyers. Are they allowed do decide for the country? Do they have an idea about nuclear topics?
> We already don't know where to put the nuclear waste.
Most of the time people who wrote this argument have no concept what nuclear waste actually looks like.
Have you actually seen what nuclear waste looks like?
It is a solid substance, it doesnt go anywhere. Waste is compact, It fits in a small warehouse. Its in a radiation proof container and doesnt kill anyone who isn't trying to eat it. Of you leave and come back in 100 years thos nuclear waste will be exactly where you left it.
Instead of generating this nuclear waste that we can store, transport, or handle in any way we please.
We have replaced nuclear capacity with coal and gas.
Generating billions of tons of CO2. That cannot be stored. There is more CO2 produced ina year that we could fit in every gas canister himanity has ever produced. Also a gas canister doesnt stay sealed for very long by itself. Every attempt at economic carbon capture has not produced very much so far.
> A lot of politicians in germany are lawyers
Same here, and I think thats precisely the problem - there are few scientists and technical proffeshions in government. Like a huge chunk of human society is not present in decision making.
> Have you actually seen what nuclear waste looks like?
Yes, it has numerous forms. Most high-level radioactive waste is stored in dry cask storage. Until you destroy the cask and the things in it, it's pretty safe. But if you keep too much at one place it becomes a great target for terrorists. If you put them below the surface you must find conditions which doesn't degrade the cask.
Medium and low-level radioactive (dry) waste is often stored in plastic bags in normal steel barrels. When they rust through, you have a big problem. And steel barrels tend to rust faster than radioactive waste decays. Germany put a lot if these barrels into the former mine Asse and had to get it back at really high cost after saline water entered the storage location. After that there was even more waste to store because you need new barrels and have to store parts of salt from the mine as well. So Germany practically had a nuclear waste storage. It didn't work out so well, so people there are skeptical when someone else says it's not a problem.
And then there are radioactive liquids in storage tanks. The only solution I have heard so far is to dilute them so that they can be dumped into the sea. That may work for small quantities of waste, but if it's done globally, we have a problem.
> Same here, and I think thats precisely the problem - there are few scientists and technical proffeshions in government. Like a huge chunk of human society is not present in decision making.
I just wanted to say that a formal degree doesn't necessarily qualify you more on the subject and I don't like someone saying "you haven't studied this shut up". I judge people by their arguments, not by their title.
But I think more expertise among politicians can never hurt.
Even ignoring this, pearl clutching about the nuclear waste storage problem without directly contrasting it with the CO2 waste problem is highly problematic. Nuclear waste is a contained, tractable problem even if challenging. We barely even know where to begin with tackling the problem of removing gigatons of CO2 from the high atmosphere.
are you saying because you can't fix one problem you shouldn't approach another? What does removal of atmospheric C02 have to do with storing nuclear waste. I think Germany has even bigger problems with there natural gas policy. Extracting C02 shouldn't be your main concern versus much dangerously low in home temperatures in winter.
Whereas for coal and other fossil burnings we do know where to store it: in our (now less) breathable air.
More people die every year from radiation from coal, excluding accidents, than have died from nuclear (including accidents) since the beginning of time.
As France shut down a lot of their nuclear power plants due to safety reason (a lot of corrosion) people in Germany are really concerned. It is said that due to the price cap on energy from nuclear power plants there was never enough money for enough maintenance.
And France is still building their nuclear waste dump site not that far from the border. Many also have a problem with this.
Without endorsing her political positions, it's false to assert that Lang does 'not have any higher education'; your own link states 'After graduating from the Hölderlin-Gymnasium Nürtingen in 2012, Lang began studying law, first at the Heidelberg University and later at the Humboldt University of Berlin, eventually dropping out in 2019 without graduating.'
Relying on hyperbole like this undermines your own argument.
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting unsubstantive and flamewar comments and ignoring our requests to stop.
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If you believe that, you're probably in a cult. The most extreme climate models don't predict anything you could reasonably characterize as "won't be a planet left."
Not to start this whole flamewar but I was totally in the other camp (not yours) and then covid hit and now my trust in consensus science is super worn out and have basically started to believe it might be fine.
Social science is far from exact enough to predict either eventuality with any confidence.
If waves of tens or hundreds of millions of refugees leaving places they cannot live in any longer begin sweeping across borders, how long will it be before fascist governments, already threatening, and already winning in Turkey, Poland, Russia, Belarus, the Philippines, Brazil, Hungary, Italy, and India take over generally and initiate wars, as they do? Such wars might not go thermonuclear, but they would certainly disrupt fragile global trade networks.
People have had terrible governments before, for most of human history in fact. I do expect global social conditions to deteriorate as climate change strains countries, but that's a far cry from the end of the planet.
As for global thermonuclear war, we could wargame likely scenarios and potential outcomes endlessly until the day it might actually happen. But anybody who tells you with certainty that one will happen in the next 20 years so there's no sense planning for the future (e.g. no sense building a power plant that will be used 20 years from now) is trying to indoctrinate you into a doomsday cult.
Nobody suggested power plants should not be constructed. At issue is what to construct. Starting nukes now brings catastrophe nearer, as they displace exactly zero CO2 output for many years, vs. alternatives that start displacing CO2 output immediately.
I am in the cult of "living in the present, where one part of the world has experienced one of the severest droughts in the history of mankind, and the other the worst floods". Recently I joined a second cult called "it's only going to get worse". So what the heck, we've got money and time for expensive solutions that take forever to finish.
> where one part of the world has experienced one of the severest droughts in the history of mankind, and the other the worst floods".
Nothing happening today, extrapolated out to 20 years with the most severe climate models, will be severe enough to cause the "end of the world". Anybody who's telling you we'll have total societal collapse by 2042 is out of touch with reality. The only way for things to go that badly that fast is for Earth to be hit by something big from space, but that is very unlikely to happen in any given 20 year period.
In case you haven't noticed, the planet stopped existing for thousand something Pakistanis that died in the floods, with two million homeless. The economic damage is estimated to be 40 billion.
It will get worse. Billions of people will be directly affected.
Soon, they will try to make their way to countries that are still kind of functioning (because they are rich), where people that are most responsible for climate change will label them "economic migrants", and say they don't have a right to come.
So yes, there will probably be a planet, just not one that will be very pleasant for living. I don't think we have time for solutions that have failed to deliver for decades, need subsidies to be built, maintained and even shutdown, and take forever to get completed.
Even if the oceans were utterly sterilized today, with all the atmospheric implications that go with that, it would take longer than 20 years for Sweden to no longer exist.
I'm not saying that climate change won't cause huge environmental disasters and social unrest, because it will. I'm saying that "there won't be a planet left after 20 years" is extreme pessimism and unsupported by any model backed by science, even if you read that claim generously and assume "won't be a planet left" is merely hyperbole for the collapse of Swedish society.
Many people mistakenly or vaguely conflate global civilization with "the planet". The distinction doesn't really matter much, from a policy perspective.
What do you mean by this? Are they actually building the intergalactical highway? If not, there will eb a planet. And there will be people. And they will enjoy life.
Some in the short term, more in the long term. But I challenge you to find any sane climate model that says Sweden won't be around in 20 years to use any infrastructure built today.
I didn't say climate change won't stress Swedish society. I'm saying the claim that climate change will make Sweden not exist to utilize a power plant in 20 years is completely out of touch. Review mainstream sources about climate change projections and scenarios and find me something that says Sweden is likely to not exist in 20 years, so they shouldn't build any new long-term infrastructure. Even if things go the worst way projected as possible, it doesn't end Sweden within 20 years.
Using climate change as an argument against building any long-term infrastructure is insane, and is probably anti-nuclear motivated thinking. What are the odds I find such doom-saying in the discussion about a bridge being designed to last 50 years? Oh gee, no point building a bridge that lasts 20 years since we'll all be dead by then, right? Tell all the architects and construction firms to stop building apartment buildings to last more than 20 years, right? Yeah right. This extreme sort of doom-saying is reserved for discussions about infrastructure planning that is opposed by the doom-sayer for some other unstated reason.
Typical right-wing reactionary environmental policy. When you do not have any climate-related politics to bring to the table, all you do is shout "nuclear" at the top of your lungs and tote it as the solution to everything climate.
> Much of the resistance towards 100% Renewable Energy (RE) systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276].
> However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]–[282]; storage (battery, compressed air, pumped hydro)[40]–[43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]–[92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive. Variability, especially short term, has many mitigation options, and energy system studies are increasingly capturing these in their 100% RE scenarios.
I guess you were downvoted for the first paragraph but the core claim you've made later on is factually accurate. Getting 80 percent of the grid onto RE, with no storage required to do that, is far cheaper and far quicker than nuclear. The variability is a non-issue. The idea that variability is a problem is propaganda by the fossil fuel lobby. They know that nuclear is too slow to build and too expensive so they create this false narrative to slow the real solution. Then people lap up the false narrative without actually checking whether it's true because it's plausible-sounding and it aligns with their partisan tribe.
Right: the fossil fuel lobby has discovered that nuke-mongering is in their interest. The nukes don't need to ever be completed, but as long as they haven't been, their market is secure.
They know the writing is on the wall, but profits can be good right up to the end.
Solar isn't economically feasible in Sweden. Too far north, too much snow, and during winter it's dark for months. Might work better in the far south, but not good enough.
It's true that in the winter it's a bit crap but in the summer the long days of the north are a boon. It doesn't need to be great in all times of the year to be "feasible" though since it's just one part of the production palette.
Nordics have been prolonged nuclear and wasted tax payers money by lobbying to unsustainable RE companies for way too long now, in addition EU sabotaging our own energy production (peat banned, trees are gonna be banned, and UNIPER). Corruption all the way.
> Besides: Are they going to buy Uranium from Russia as the US are doing for their reactors?
Sweden has been anti-nuclear for several decades, and one of the laws that has been passed is to forbid Uranium extraction, even though Sweden has quite a bit in its soil.
So if this development is any sign, maybe they'll do away with that silly law as well and make it so Sweden doesn't have to buy it from someone else?
Also, Russia isn't the largest exporter of Uranium.
„Russia is a significant supplier of both uranium and uranium enrichment services. According to the latest available data, the European Union purchased about 20 percent of its natural uranium and 26 percent of its enrichment services from Russia in 2020. The United States imported about 14 percent of its uranium and 28 percent of all enrichment services from Russia in 2021.“
They have also pledged to create legal guarantees that future politicians will not be able to shut down functioning nuclear power reactors without suitable monetary compensation to the owners/operators of these reactors.
In addition to this, they are commissioning an urgent study on how to rebuild Ringhals 1 and 2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringhals_Nuclear_Power_Plant, about 1 GW each), two nuclear reactors that were prematurely decommissioned by the previous social-democratic government and shut down about 20 months ago.
Personally I'm really happy; I think massive expansion of nuclear power is the only realistic way to fix climate change.
The first reactors built will be modern but traditionally large. From then on: There has been a lot of interest in small modular reactors (SMR) from the political party that is driving all of this, and they actually got the nationally owned energy company Vattenfall to begin building prototypes at Ringhals a few months ago.
In summary: Lots of champagne bottles popping tonight in Sweden in the homes of clean nuclear power proponents. We have been waiting for this for a very long time. Cheers!